Friday Art Attack

I can't remember what this is supposed to be exactly, but I'm pretty sure I found it on a Duckduckgogo search for either Yeti or Sasquatch.

Maybe it's just because we live in a hateful gynarcho-tyranny, but I find the notion of Dark Lord's less frightening than that of Dark Queens.

These two have an interesting side by side comparison quality to them that I quite like.  Now, granted, Graz'zt and Iggwilv as presented by Wayne Reynolds is quite the iconic D&D character set by now, while whoever that big ogre-looking dude and that blond nearly naked chick are by Luis Royo look like pretty standard naked Luis Royo chicks and her monster.  But given how incredibly talented an artist he is, that's OK.

The iconic Strigoi image; the most bestial and ghoulish of vampires, who eventually evolved into the whole Flesh-Eater Courts concept.  Funny; at the time Vampire Counts first introduced this split, I didn't really think that the Strigoi concept was a popular one.  It must have been if it later evolved into an entire army, I suppose.

A Crusader undead.  Nothing special, just a cool piece of art.

Speaking of the Flesh-Eater Courts, here's an image from that army book.

In Contrast, here's a very iconic vampire.  Seriously; why do vampires always have to be wearing a lacy neckerchief, anyway?  In spite of the obvious technical skill of this art, I do have that particular detail.

Because one of the new Warhammer armies is basically an Aquaman or Little Mermaid elf force, they have a lot of models of elves (sorry, ...aelves.  How totally gay) who are riding on sharks and stuff.  Apparently, when fighting any other army that doesn't live in the ocean, these sharks either fly around or jump or something.  I'm not quite sure how that's supposed to work.  It's actually one of the weirder things in the new, much less compelling Warhammer world.

Another fantasy version of a vampire... and he's got a lacy neckerchief.  Sigh.

5e Vrock, I believe.  I think Sam Wood's illustration for 3e was still the best one, though.

Another basic yet well done undead illustration. 

And another horned yeti.  I wonder when horns started to become common on fantasy yeti illustrations, because there's obviously nothing in the folklore source material that suggests horns. 

Maybe it all started with The Empire Strikes Back.

An interesting take on a weird, humanoid yet serpentine demon or something.  Quite a fascinating concept, whatever it is.

While I actually found the books unreadable, I was really excited about the concept of C.J. Cherryh's Russian mythology/folklore fantasy.  As is often the case, she went too far into making it historical rather than fantastical.  Not the best approach for fantasy, and one that tends to bog down many works that otherwise have a lot of promise, in my opinion. 

Or maybe I just am kinda weird and prefer my historical swashbuckling romances and my fantasy to have a clean break in terms of the secondary world concept.

Dresden Files style modern urban fantasy, I guess, excepted.

Yet another concept on vampires.  As I've said several times this week, I prefer vampires who aren't overtly sexy and have some kind of inhuman, monstrous visual tic to them.

Because it's now no longer available, here's the necrosphinx model from the old Tomb Kings army list.  Not sure what I think about this still, many years after first seeing it.  Is it really cool, or just a little too... I dunno, out there?  I still can't decide.

A very fairytale like illustration, which I think is a classic mode of fantasy that is too often either ignored or poorly done.  I never would have thought that this would be one of the better sources of this kind of fantasy, but the Dresden Files books that feature the faeries do faeries better than most sources I've otherwise seen.

Indo-European phylogeny

Well, in light of the last post I made, I went and got a hold of the preprint of the Chang et al 2015 paper that was referred to in the comments, and read through it (although admittedly, I started skimming when we got the specific methods, about halfway through, and came back in for the discussion and conclusions.)

The gist of the paper is that it is a new linguistic cladogram that purports to eliminate errors that have dogged past cladograms, especially by introducing ancestry constraints that don't stretch the time frame required by being unable to reconcile, for example, the fact that Old Irish is an ancestor of modern Irish and Scots Gaelic, and not a sister language of them.  This not only strongly reduces the (already very low) probability that anything other than the steppe hypothesis works, but it also put constraints on the splitting of various branches from the whole, and shows more nodal relationships; like Indo-Iranian being a node between PIE and separate Indic and Iranian nodes, but further removed from that most obvious one.  Almost all linguists recognize Indo-Iranian, and most recognize the slightly more controversial Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic intermediate nodes.  This paper suggest many such intermediate nodes, which then in turn gives archaeologists and archaeogeneticists material to go look for to corroborate.

Anyway, it's one of the most interesting linguistic papers I've read in a long time, even though it's strictly speaking a statistics paper rather than linguistics per se.  It's obvious that it has informed the hypothesis that Davidski mentioned and which I referred to in my last post.  Let's see how I can make it work, if I can.  Because the family tree has time stamps on the nodes, let's start with the oldest and work our way forward.  Keep in mind that this can't analyze languages that are too poorly attested to be useful in the cladistic analysis, so if you want to try and speculate on where they fit in, it'll have to be speculative, or at best, rely on other evidence than linguistic.  I'm unfortunately not really familiar enough with the archaeological literature to posit where and how archaeological cultures can correspond to this linguistic phylogeny, but presumably it wouldn't be terribly difficult to do.  It does fit, albeit quite broadly, with David Anthony's revised steppe hypothesis in many ways.

• By 6,500 years ago, 4,500 BC, the Anatolian languages had split out from PNIE, or proto-Nuclear Indo-European (i.e. everything else besides Anatolian.)
• Between 3,500 BC and 4,000 BC, Tocharian had split off from PNIE.
• By 3,500 BC, a node that includes Greek, Albanian and Armenian (and presumably Phrygian) branches off, but remains in close geographic adjacency for some time, so it can absorb some isoglosses via borrowing.  Presumably this is the first movement of Usatovo culture into the Balkans from the steppe.
• By 3,000 BC the rest of the IE tree's node was starting to break up and the Indo-Iranian languages branched off.  Maybe this corresponds to their very early history as the languages of very northerly Eastern Corded Ware and before they really developed enough traits to truly be called Indo-Iranian.
• Between 2,500 and 2,000 BC the Balto-Slavic languages split off, again representing a northerly Corded Ware dialect, no doubt.
• By 2,500 BC, Albanian splits off from the Graeco-Armenian node, by whatever name this proto Albanian is known (Illyrian?)
• Between 2,500 and 2,000 BC a Germanic node breaks off.
• Shortly after 2,000 BC Italic and Celtic separate.  Iranian and Indic do right around here as well.  Not long after this, Greek and Armenian separate from each other too.
• By about 500 BC, Baltic and Slavic start to differentiate themselves from proto-Balto-Slavic.  Not long after this, Brythonic and Goidelic Celtic split (no idea how Continental Celtic and Celtiberian fit into this at this point.)
• A the Meridian of Time, Eastern Germanic splits from a node that contains Western and Northern Germanic still combined.  They will themselves separate before 500 AD.
• By 700-800 AD or so, Slavic is starting to break up from Common Slavic and Vulgar Latin is starting to actually produce the Romance languages.  By 1,000 AD, both have sufficiently broken apart that even Late Common Slavic (or Common Romance) can no longer be spoken of and the specific daughter languages are recognizable.

Now, this seems to imply that Italo-Celtic is the last "core" of nuclear Indo-European, but of course, that's absurd; whatever joint innovations it has are shared peripheral changes combined with some shared conservative features (which, for example, led people to chase after a Celtic-Tocharian link decades ago).  Italo-Celtic developed, wherever and however exactly it developed and as the language of whatever material culture spoke it, far to the western periphery.  The chart could be drawn otherwise, but the dates would still be the same and the same lines would still connect even if you changed the order in which they were presented.  It also seems to imply that some steppe language core split off early, and while it's probably true that they were differentiating themselves early, they also maintained a degree of contact that allowed the sharing of innovative isoglosses well after their split (such as satemization.) 

But it really puts it out there that we can look for material cultures that represent some of these nodes.  For example, if Italic and Celtic didn't break up until after 2,000 BC, we can look for a material culture that's the right time, place, and has the right traits to represent it.  Maybe the Tumulus culture breaking up into Urnfield (early Celtic) and Terramare culture (Italic).  Which has the interesting effect of suggesting that maybe Venetic was a third branch of that group, originating in the Polada culture?  And if Germanic had separated from Italo-Celtic less than half a millennia before Italic and Celtic themselves split, then we can look for a material culture that's in the right time, place, and has the right traits to represent the three of them still in a state of some unity (Unetice culture leading to Italo-Celtic Tumulus and early Germanic Nordic Bronze Age?  This even potentially leaves room for that Nordwestblock, although we shouldn't consider that the archaeological culture boundaries we've devised are really boundaries that were meaningful back then.)  And the early Germanic should have a contact border with that material culture of proto-Balto-Slavic (Trziniec-Komarov culture), because they do not show a particularly close genetic relationship, but we know that there was a long period of contact relationship between them.

Anyway, it's not like that wasn't being done before this paper came out, but this gives a significantly improved roadmap of what to look for and when.

Anyway, here's the phylogeny from the article:

Another discussion about Celtic and Germanic:

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/26447-Celtic-and-Pre-Germanic

Corded Ware and Yamnaya

Well, Davidski at Eurogenes has made a bold prediction, which I'm curious to see falsified or bolstered by more sampling.  His suggestion is that the model for the spread of Indo-European languages which I've espoused here is unnecessary; most of the extant Indo-European languages (and by extension, the Indo-European peoples) can actually be derived directly from the Corded Ware horizon (plus whatever locals they superimposed themselves over while doing so) and the specifically Single Grave variant is the source for Western Europe, not Yamnaya derived Bell Beaker cultures.  This is based on two key assumptions:

1. At a genome wide-level, the Corded Ware and Yamnaya are extremely closely related.  His contention here is that that Y-DNA sorting between an R1a and an R1b patrilineal group is either an artifact of insufficient sampling, or simply a much less important data point than the genome wide statistical comparison.  Utilizing this genome-wide comparison, even the eastern and central European Bell Beakers, who are credited with being the source of R1b lineages in the North Sea region (famously, those who settled Britain in the EMBA period) can be derived from the Corded Ware and don't require an external stimulus.
2. And even if it did, the usual suspects are suggesting that they provide the wrong specific clade of R1b.  The Carpathian Yamnaya extension is most likely the source, not of an overlay over Corded Ware that creates the the northern European I-E languages, but rather, of the southern Balkan languages and spread even further south and often eastward, such as Thracian, Illyrian, Phrygian, Greek, Armenian, etc.

Now, to be clear, what he's saying is that it looks like the R1b haplogroups that are today common in western and northern Europe cannot be derived from the Yamnaya expansion into the Carpathian basin.  Let's be careful that we don't load that claim with too much baggage.  And he's also admitting that it's a somewhat speculative assertion at this point, because there isn't enough data yet to confirm or refute it.  But he is making a prediction, based on what little data we do have, about what he expects more data to reveal.  And that prediction is that the Dutch Bell Beakers, who are the source of the later British Bell Beakers and probably the Nordic Bronze Age a little bit later, don't necessarily require an overlay of Yamnaya over Corded Ware, but rather Corded Ware over locals is sufficient to explain them.  

Of course, population movements are not so binary, so when we talk in generalities, it doesn't require that every individual conform to it, merely the preponderance.

Anyway, here's a few interesting comments from the thread where this prediction was made.  I leave these here without further comment from me, other than to note that this proposes a very different model than the one that I've seen online from most folks who are doing up-to-the-minute discussions, which consider Corded Ware to have been a satem language descended from the western half of the steppe (Sredni Stog II) with R1a Y-DNA haplogroups, and eastern Bell Beakers to be the classic example (among many other cultures of Europe that were related to it) to have been the source of centum languages, descended from the eastern half of the steppe (Repin and Khvalynsk > Yamnaya) and heavily R1b.  Although, that's the gist of why it's a bold prediction, isn't it?

This new set of proposed movements is extremely difficult to reconcile with linguistic isoglosses and the various trees for PIE. In general, the satem languages and Greek form an innovative core compared to Italic, Celtic, Tocharian, Anatolian, all of which left earlier. A derivation of those which left earlier directly from Yamnaya, through the Balkans and Bell Beaker in Western Europe for Italic-Celtic and other Western IE dialects (e.g. Ligurian, Venetic) and Afanasievo into Asia for Tocharian, plus a derivation of the innovative set of Indo-Iranian, Greek and Armenian from R1a and EEF containing Corded Ware, seem to make good sense of the genetics and the linguistics. If Western IE ancestry also derives from Corded Ware, we don't have much to explain the distribution of features among the IE languages.
Any proposed set of movements have to explain the core-periphery distinction described above, plus the following features:
1. Anatolian shares a few features with Western IE languages
2. Italic and Celtic must be close to each other until they split
3. Greek is partly in the innovative group and partly in the periphery
4. Germanic is like Greek, but is close to Celtic throughout its history as well
In particular, if Celtic, Italic, Germanic, all the way to Indo-Iranian all drive from Corded Ware peoples, how can it be that Bell Beaker is responsible for a single language family, Celtic, while Corded Ware--not much older than Bell Beaker--is responsible for a huge diversity of IE branches? The temporal chronology doesn't make much sense to me.

 ~~~

I recently believed this as well, but I changed my mind after reading Chang et al 2015.It looks like the innovative core was the centered on the steppe area. As waves of IE cultures spread from the steppe to surrounding environments, they lost contact with the core and thus didn't share in the innovations.In the example of the Satem isogloss, it looks like Corded Ware was originally Centum, but parts of it were Satemized later in a new wave emanating from the steppe, around the time of Sintashta. This wave of innovations spread to some areas adjacent to the steppe, like the Balkans and Eastern Europe, but cultures at the periphery of the steppe zone like proto-Germanic and proto-Greek were only partially influenced and more distant groups like Celtics, Italics, and Tocharians escaped the influence entirely. It does seem that the composition of steppe groups changed from Yamnaya-like Yamnaya, Poltavka and Catacomb groups to Corded-ware-like Sintashta, Srubna and Andronovo groups, and the later set is associated with Satem isogloss and other innovations.

~~~

Perhaps some parts of CW were centum, and that explains everything, but that basically means Corded Ware gave rise to all the languages that are part of late IE outside Anatolian and Tocharian, while BB gave rise to only Celtic, and maybe some para-celtic groups like Ligurian. How can that be when both groups are very little separated in age? Does this make sense to you?

 ~~~

If we accept what Davidski (and others) have postulated, the scenario looks something like the following if you try to correlate the Chang tree with archaeogenetic evidence:

Pre-Yamnaya>>Anatolian
Circa Yamnaya>>Tocharian
CW>>Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, (Daco-Thracian?)
Western Yamnaya>>Greek, Armenian, Albanian, (Phrygian?)
Some of these branches influenced each other after initial divergence, which would explain why there are isoglosses shared across some of these branches that remained contiguous with each other.

 ~~~

It should have been obvious long ago that most Indo-European languages have their roots in the Corded Ware complex, considering how similar Sintashta was to Bell Beakers, and how different they both were from Yamnaya.
There's been way too much focus on Y-haplogroups and their phylogeny by most, resulting in some wayward assumptions being popularized.

 ~~~

The Balkans are the only region of IE Europe today not dominated by late clades of R1a or R1b, and, judging from the aDNA record, did not have extreme male-biased replacement right away after contact with Steppe cultures and reached its current levels of steppe ancestry much later compared to Western, Northern or Eastern Europe. The EEF elites interred in kurgans mentioned by David are pretty indicative. The models of acculturation and integration may have more traction here than elsewhere.

Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Clever title.  Making reference to either Gibbon or Shirer, either one, is always a good idea.

Sadly, the title (well, and the Todd Marshall pencil sketches inside) were the best parts of this book.  I remember being keenly disappointed when I was a young college student.  As I was approaching graduation with my Bachelors, I had a few elective requirements to fulfill, so I'd go and look for upper level classes in subjects I was interested in, like dinosaur paleontology or anthropology.  And I remember thinking that taking an upper level class would mean I'd find some fascinating things out, but that we literally didn't learn anything that I didn't already know; in fact, often the curriculum would be dumbed down from what I already knew about the subject.

Steve Brusatte, who I had higher hopes for after seeing, among other things, his definitive tyrannosaur cladograms, is guilty of (among other flaws) doing the same thing in this book.  It really doesn't say much of anything that isn't already well known to anyone who has even a passing interest in dinosaurs, with the possible exception of a couple of pages of his discussion about the Triassic and the fact that it took another extinction event at end-Triassic to open up opportunities for dinosaurs that were otherwise occupied by pseudosuchians.

The other two flaws were, if anything, even more annoying, though.  I can forgive a book that doesn't tell me much that I don't already know—it'll be forgettable, sure, but I'll just chalk it up to the challenge of finding new information in the era where I've both taught myself how to read the technical literature, but I can follow developments in real time (or close to) because of the magic of the internet.  But when he spends an inordinate amount of time smugly, and even snarkily virtue-signaling, that's offensive.  When he spends an inordinate amount of time name-dropping and referring to at least two dozen people as "his really good friend" one has to imagine that cringy, insecure, social-status signaling is more important to him than the actual subject of the book.

I not only can't recommend this book, I can actively recommend that you avoid it.  Sadly.  I had high hopes for it.  However, not only did I get a few pages of Triassic discussion, a subject which is sadly untouched in the popular literature (although I've been following it on blogs like Chinleana for years) I did hear about a discovery that I had missed, the bizarre, bat-winged dinosaur Yi qi.  Sadly, a terrible name.  And how do you even pronounce it?  Yee chee? Yee kee? Or do you just say Yee?  But that wasn't even worth the price—which in my case was a few cents for gas and my time for me to go to the library and pick it up for free.

So, let me add something totally different to this post, just to make it a little more meaty too.  While toy sales is not something that I care about for its own sake, it's a great surrogate for Star Wars' place in fandom and the public consciousness.  Sure, sure—we all know what the Rotten Tomatoes score is for The Last Jedi and Solo (although, we all also know that it's been manipulated by lying SJWs who falsely claim that "alt.right trolls" are gaming the rankings; so based on this flimsy bald assertion, they've gone and ... gamed the rankings.)  And sure, sure—we all know what the ticket sales are.

But there's more going on than just that.  And the merchandising is an important part of the story.

So, watch this video.  It's fascinating stuff, and should be a wake-up call to the corporate overlords.  But the corporate overlords are not really that bright, and they are more defined by their belonging to an anti-American cult who thinks its more important to virtue signal how much they hate you and everything about you; your religious traditions, your cultural traditions, your legal traditions, and even your very right to exist at all in your own freakin' homeland than they are in, say, being successful with your multi-billion dollar corporation.  Billions of dollars is a small price to pay for comfort of delusional wishful thinking.  But there you have it.



And as a bonus; remember this?  Just a reminder that before the Green Cult went absolutely insane doubling and tripling down on the global warming hoax, people still knew them for what they were and called them out.  I'm reminded of it, because the global warming hoax was specifically (and self-righteously and smugly and snarkily) referenced a few times by Brusatte.  Seriously.  As if it isn't common knowledge that there's been more than 15 years of no warming and the whole hockey stick graph wasn't specifically and incontrovertibly exposed as a hoax.

But like I said; the Green cult is a cult.  Facts don't matter to them.

Acid Nightmare

I just listened to this again (before that, I heard the 140 Squadron remix; now I'm literally listening to the original version.)  It's hard to overstate how much I love this track.  It's maybe not quite as chunky and intense as some tracks I have (although the Future Tribes and Pila's 2006 remixes certainly kinda are), but it's just incredibly anyway.  The face-melting main acid riff, the callback to Nightmare on Elm Street, the melodic piano of the Wavetraxx mix in particular; this is just a great track.

While I'm sure Frank Ellrich would love to live it down and get more recognition for his wider body of work (which is pretty extensive, after all) this collaboration with Kai Franz is still the best thing he ever did, and it'll be remembered as such forever.



That said, he also has some really good other stuff.  Acid Save Your Soul and Acid Headcracker are nearly as good, for instance, and come in a variety of versions.  The new(ish) song Sad Euphoria is brilliant, and the B-side Storm & Thunder is one of my favorites too.

Cult of Undeath "plot" outline updates

The following is my first stab at fixing some of the elements of the "plot" of the adventure path, both to make it much less linear in feel, much less railroady and much more focused.  This isn't meant to be the "final" version, I'm brainstorming with myself on how to improve the material I've already got.  Because it's a "brainstorming with myself" post, it might be all over the map, and it probably will be subject to future change.

First, let me make sure I'm clear with myself and what I don't like about the original outline.  Even though it features some significant modifications from the "plot" of the Carrion Crown adventure path, it still follows the general gist of the adventure path, sorta, and some of that may well be much of what eventually gets changed.  The things that don't work for me are basically:

1. The first act feels a little too scattershot and maybe unfocused.  I think I need to better narrow down on what's going on, and not have too many things that are, essentially, tangents cluttering it up too much.  Or maybe find a way to make the tangents more meaningful rather than just "here's another monster to fight."
2. The second act with its trips to the werewolf forest and the Lovecraftian seaside town feels tacked on, like the entire act is treading water rather than progressing towards the third act.  I kind of tried to fix that by making it less of a tangent and more of a rivalry between two bad guys, but I didn't do a great job of it, and the second act still feels kind of superfluous not only because it doesn't lead to the third act, but also because now it feels too repetitive with the third act.  The second act should make things more difficult for the characters, and leave them even more in the lurch.  Either that, or I treat each act as a separate "volume" or self-contained module of sorts, and have each of the three of them have their own satisfying conclusion.  I probably prefer that the second act act like a second act, not a second self-contained volume in a three part series, but we'll see how it ends up being when all is said and done.
3. Either the second or third act needs to be significantly reformulated so that they're not essentially the same plot for both.

Anyway, let me focus today on the first act, not only because that's the easiest to do, but also because, well... it comes first, after all.  This is what I had for that in my original wrap-up outline for CULT OF UNDEATH, and let me repeat what I had before I go start making changes to it.

• A well-loved professor, Alpon Lechfeld has died in what appears to be an accident—although there are some suspicious clues that cannot rule out foul play.  For the sake of getting the game going, I'm going to tell the PCs that they've all been asked to be pallbearers and are named as (minor) heirs in his will.  He'll give them a few things, but most of his fortune is left to his daughter Revecca.
• Ghosts are appearing in town, threatening (or at least frightening) many residents, that can be traced to a haunted and abandoned ruin of a former prison.  Why are they leaving their normal territory? (linked to the murder above.)
• A rampaging Frankenstein-monster is blamed for some more townsfolk murders.  This, and the ghosts, are probably happening at the same time, so nobody knows which is responsible.
• A mob of townsfolk wants to exhume Lechfeld and "put down his corpse"—of course, it turns out that someone has already exhumed him and dismembered his corpse, as well as apparently eaten some other recently dead in the graveyard.  Notably, an amulet that he was buried with is missing.  Revecca suggests that this amulet kept the ghosts in check in some way; if it's gone, that explains their extraordinary aggressiveness.
• The Frankenstein monster was a creation of Lechfeld himself in an extremely foolhardy experiment years ago, and it has come into town looking for him when he stopped visiting.  It really is a monster, though, not some misunderstood something or other—he's killed numerous townsfolk viciously.
• The ghosts have to be put down (salt and burn their remains) in their haunted house.
• The flesh golem needs to be dealt with as well.  And then when that's done, the amulet is still missing, and hints point towards the possible thief, which will lead into 

(The last bullet point I just added, but it seems kind of obvious.  Maybe that's why I forgot to include it the first time around.) Part of the reason that this may feel disjointed and weird is that it's really two modules that I've combined.  Mostly what I did was combine the two characters and two plots and try to intertwine them.  The haunted ghost stuff and the Frankenstein monster are really two separate plot threads in the original source material.

I think maybe it would work better if I got rid of the idea (which came from Paizo) that the flesh golem was just a hobby of Lechfeld's and it's only out of control because of his death.  He didn't create it in a burst of curiosity or loneliness; he created it because he knew that as soon as he was dead, his undead amulet would be targeted by people who couldn't be trusted to take it.

This also serves to make Lechfeld much more sympathetic, although flawed, because his plan didn't work.  He protected his amulet during his life, but after his death, his plan failed.  Why?  Why didn't the flesh golem manage to ward off the depredations, and if it was unsuccessful, why is it now killing people instead of having been destroyed by those who stole the amulet?

I'm actually thinking that maybe some kind of vaguely Lovecraftian or daemonic parasite is attached to the golem's head and scrambling its programming; a contingency that was completely foreign to Lechfeld, which is why he didn't make a plan to protect against it.

Curiously, it also makes the Frankenstein monster somewhat tragic again, although not in the comically inept virtue-sniveling way that it was originally written in Way of the Beast, or whatever the module was exactly titled. Not entirely, because it's only semi-sentient at best; more like an AI than a sentient being exactly.  But still; it's failure is also not its fault, so there's that.

My first thought is that although once they find out what's going no at the very end, the two strands tie together better, for the majority of this act, nothing is different than it was before.  Maybe that's actually totally OK.  In fact, I kind of think that it is.  The presence of some kind of vaguely Lovecraftian entity also allows me to figure out a way to salvage the trip to fake Innsmouth too, maybe.  That helps set up my next post in this series, where I try to untangle the awkward threads that I have for acts II and III.

As a migrate further and further from the original Paizo plot, I'm even wondering about a couple of things: 1) do I want the pallbearers and heirs set-up that the module provides, and 2) do I want the ghosts to come from a haunted ruin of a prison, or are those distinctive enough to the module that I'd rather come up with something else?  If I do, I want it to be better, so we'll see.  The ghosts certainly don't have to come from a prison, or even from the same source at all, if I don't want them to.  That's easy enough to change.  Heck, they can even come shrieking down into town from the wilderness just outside, where their original versions were bandits.  Or they can just come from whatever source they originally came from; a random collection of psycopaths united only by geography.  

But changing the funeral set-up is a bit harder, because it's a good set-up, and no obvious alternatives suggest themselves (other than having the PCs be an investigative team looking into the possibility that he was murdered—but that's even more of a railroady introduction than it already is.)

Fixing Cult of Undeath

Yeah, yeah—I know.  I've been done with my CULT OF UNDEATH project for a long time.  But I'm revisiting it, for a variety of reasons, including the notion of updating it to DH5, of converting it into a novel outline, and, of course, trying to get the whole shebang into a set-up that I could really run; I'm not quite sure that the project ended with something that I'd be very inclined to use as is, to be honest with you, although it's certainly a lot closer than the actual Paizo Adventure paths on which they are (increasingly loosely) based.  So, let me take a few posts to discuss how I'd polish this off and actually use it, maybe for DH5 now.

First, let's back up just a bit and discuss some of the latest developments.  DH5 is, now, only vaguely going to spell out any territory beyond two adjacent areas (at least for now); Timischburg itself, which originates in the CULT OF UNDEATH project, and the Hill Country.  This one takes place in the former, kinda by force; the setting was developed specifically for this and vice versa, and the whole fantasy Transylvania vibe is a hugely important part of the whole tone and theme.  Timischburg, then, has to have a similar appearance to Transylvania during the late 1890s when Stoker wrote Dracula (except transposed somehow into Medieval European fantasy.)  Let's review briefly; the population of Transylvania was about 60-70% or so Romanian, or Vlach, with 10-15% Austrian/German, and the remainder Hungarian.  The Hungarian and German percentages of the population fluctuated over time; during the specific years Dracula was written, the Hungarian population reached its highest percentage; just over 30%, but about 20% as an average is more typical.  After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following World War I, the Austrian/German population dwindled rapidly (today it is less than half of one percent) and the Hungarian population also went into decline versus the Romanian population.

For simplicity's sake, Timischburg doesn't have three main ethnic groups (with a smattering of others); it has only two; the alt.Magyars in my setting don't exist.  I've got Romanian common people (mostly, with a few landed gentry here and there) mostly ruled over by a superstrate of Germanic/Austrian nobility.  Although I'm handwaving away the details of the greater area, the notion is that the Timischer nobility is related to the population of Carlovingia, which of course makes sense.

Briefly; what exactly is a Romanian and how does an alt.Romanian in the form of my Tarushan ethnicity even fit?  I dunno.  Quite honestly, nobody knows what a Romanian is; they are clearly a "native" Balkan people, which means among other things, that they've been washed over by wave after wave of conquerors; Indo-Europeans (probably in multiple waves) in prehistory; the region emerges at the beginning of recorded history as Dacian (but it was probably some other Indo-European culture before the Dacians and Thracians were displaced from the steppe by the expanding Cimmerians and proto-Sintashta and Andronovo cultures that eventually emerged as the Scythians.

Dacia was famously conquered by the Romans, and one theory is that the Romanians are descendants of the mixed native Dacian and Roman colonists before the area was again washed over by various Germanic tribes, Avars, Magyars, several Slavic tribes, Ottomans, and more.  Without the complex real world history of this region, how do I get Tarushans?  Dunno.  Don't really care, honestly.  They're there, and there's a German Timischer aristocracy that makes up most of the upper class in Timischburg.

All that said; the Timischer aristocracy is both related to and relatively friendly with (most of the time) the peoples of Carlovingia and the Six Colonists.  Whatever political rivalries they have, they aren't really cultural rivalries.  This makes different groups of human more likely to be seen in Timischburg than otherwise might be, because they all more or less get along, at least today.  Of course, anyone who comes from the Hill Country (the primary vector to the rest of the Six Colonists) would have to pass through the Knifetop Mountains, which are surrounded by (respectively) the Thursewood and the Haunted Forest.  No doubt, anyone who makes that trip will have some interesting stories to tell, and not as many people make it as you'd think.  This leads to the whole notion that Timischburg has become an isolated nation, separated and if not exactly cut off from the rest of the nations on the continent.  For some, this manifests as a suspicious and surly distrust of any outsiders, but others see themselves somewhat like a nation under siege, who welcome friendly faces as potential allies.

Of course, DH5 isn't just a human setting, and although based on Transylvania (loosely), Timischburg isn't just a human nation either.  Woses lurk in the wild places of Timischburg.  The cursed make up a sizable ethnic block on the coast, adjacent, probably, to their own homeland of Lomar.  The other side of the country borders on Gunaakt.  This means that woses, cursed, orcs and goblins can all be expected to be seen in low numbers, but without raising eyebrows, because while they're obviously foreigners to some degree, they're not so exotic to the natives that they haven't seen them many times before traveling through, and even living among them in small numbers. (The exceptions being the small areas in which the cursed and woses dominate the local population, of course.)

Kemlings, jann and skraelings are all probably more exotic, and nephilim are meant to be exotic everywhere, by nature, but all of them can probably travel in more or less safety and security assuming that they don't cause trouble when they roll through town.

The revised population figures are roughly 70% Tarushan (alt.Romanian), 10% Timischer (alt.Austrian), 7% each wose and cursed, 2% orc, 3% goblin, and 1% other (a few kemlings and jann, mostly.  Anything else is too small of a population to register.)  This population does not include "monsters" like the thurses in the Thursewood, for instance, or vampires in Grozavest.  Nor does it include travelers and visitors; these are actual inhabitants of the country on a regular, sustained basis.

Also given that vampires are native to this area and make up an important part of the theme (if not the population, of course) it's probably wise to discuss them briefly. Although Stoker did of course describe the Count as having a number of unusual physical features that if not exactly monstrous, were certainly unusual bordering on freakish, he also spelled out the current interpretation of vampires as sophisticated and suave predators.  Sexy even. As bored housewives got a hold of this archetype, they took it to bizarrely exaggerated levels; notably Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer.  On the other hand, I find myself more inclined to focus on the vampire's monstrous origin.  Their pretensions at sophistication are usually just pretensions after all; vampires are monsters.  If you're at all familiar with the clans of Vampire: the Masquerade, they'd be mostly a combination of the Nosferatu, Gangrel and Malkavian clans all in one.  In Warhammer Vampire Counts terms, they'd be a fusion of Nosferatu and the Ghoul Kings.  Or, more fairly and accurately, they're a melange of sorts of all of those specific influences, but the urbane, sophisticated vampire archetype is deliberately de-emphasized.

In this, I'm curiously paralleling some developments that Age of Sigmar is doing to Warhammer.  They seem to have actually completely normalized Strigoi to a great degree with the release of the Flesh-Eater Courts.  Sure, they do still claim that Soulblight vampires exist and they're part of the Legions of Nagash army book, but they're become much more inhuman in general, and even the miniatures for characters like Mannfred von Carstein now show him as bald, gray, possessing a ridged row of lumps along the top of his head, and generally looking less human and more monstrous than ever.

While shape-changing was always part of traditional vampire lore, I like the idea explored in the otherwise really quite mediocre movie Van Helsing that suggests that the form to which they shapeshift is a bat-like semi-humanoid monster; curiously, not at all unlike the Warhammer vargheists, varghulfs, crypt flayer, and even their winged vampire lord models.  Unlike in Warhammer, these shape-shifts are not permanent, but ones that the vampires can go back and forth between, but at no point can they now pass as aristocratic humans, except under very heavy disguise.

In general, Van Helsing, in spite of the fact that it really wasn't a very good movie, did an absolutely perfect job of highlighting the mood, the theme, the visuals, and the general vibe of Timischburg.  Same for the James Purefoy Solomon Kane.  Come to think of it, all of Solomon Kane is a decent fit, even though the stories and the movie don't exactly have the same vibe.

Anyway, coming soon to this CULT OF UNDEATH tag will be an update and reorganization of the "plot" of the adventure path—something that I was never quite happy with as originally done, maybe over the course of two or three more posts.  I might also add a few optional new monster stat lines as part of the whole affair, although if I do, they will not be added to the official monster list, with the probably exception of the update to the vampire entry.  After that, we'll see where we go, and if there's any reason to continue to use this tag for new posts or not.

Virus Inc, Synthflut, Kamui, etc.

While I have a ton of harddance tracks, of course, some percolate and rise to the top, while others kind of sink into the general pool; I like them, but they don't stand out as much as others.  A lot of the output of Kamui (and their various other names) is near the top of my list, in particular this song by one of their aliases, Virus, Inc.

I don't know which of the two mixes I prefer, but they're both great.  And super intense, which is part of why I like them so much.  Not that intensity by itself is sufficient, because I actually have a lot of intense yet kinda forgettable and indistinguishable tracks too.  But the intensity of these is one of the reasons I love them, certainly.

The labeling is kinda funky.  According to discogs, the digital release and Spotify has an "Original Mix" that's about 7:50 long, and a "Club Mix" that's just under 7:30.  But the original vinyl had a "Club Mix" and a "Trance Mix", and both have the exact same length of 7:53.

I expect that that's a typo on the sleeve, and that there really are just the two mixes, and one of them is about thirty seconds shorter than the other.  I also suspect that the "Trance Mix" and the "Original Mix" are the same.

I'm however, not completely sure, since I don't have the vinyl to listen to and compare.

In the original (or Trance) mix, check out that little percussion riff shortly after 7:00.  Just awesome.  Sure, it's a minor little thing, but they put that in the outro.  Because they don't just rest on their laurels and have it fade out while repeating, of course!

Categorizing undead

I don't know much about this new Warhammer setting, other than that it takes place in some magical place that post-dates the old Warhammer setting, which blew up and was remade.  Because Warhammer is a setting that's meant more to facilitate army games than anything else (regardless of the success Black Library has or had) this meant that some troop types were shuffled around, and some other changes here and there were made.  Also, it means that there were a lot of gratuitous name changes: I don't know why dwarves are now duardin, or elves are now aelves, or orcs are now orruks, and trolls are now troggoths or ogres are now orogs, etc.  That seems not only gratuitous, but even foolish; when they had cultural resonance that went back centuries to instead replace them with something that has none.  Warhammer had a good thing going, and they threw it away on a gamble that... I dunno.  Maybe it hasn't made a difference in their sales, or maybe it has.  Certainly it's meant that while I see a lot of ideas that I like in the new setting, overall it's still much less compelling to me than it used to be, and let's face it—those same good ideas could just have easily been implemented in the old setting.

As an example, let me show you what one of my favorite thematic factions have done.  I came into Games Workshop fandom in the early to mid 90s.  I'd been familiar with them from some early White Dwarf magazines and Citadel miniatures I'd stumbled across in the late 80s (although I was more into the Grenadier and Ral Partha D&D stuff back then—whatever happened to those companies anyway?)  At the time, Warhammer was in it's 4th edition (it got up to 8th before rebooting as Age of Sigmar).  The Undead Army book had recently come out, and back when I was fairly regularly buying White Dwarf magazines (mostly to read; my involvement in the hobby was somewhat peripheral due to the time and budget constraints of being a young, married college student and later father and grad student) the one that came out to feature the new Undead Army Book was one of the early ones I got (I guess that would have been in the mid to late 160s in terms of issue number, I think?)

Undead back then were all kinds of undead, and while thematically, they were all undead, that doesn't mean that that theme wasn't maybe a bit too broad and unfocused.  Not sure why Egyptian style mummies would fight alongside Dracula and skeleton chariots and catapults made out of bone anyway, but again; if you interpolate the Warhammer setting out of its obvious focus on wargames and try to use it as source material for fantasy roleplaying (and the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game is a cult classic) then that doesn't matter too much anyway.  But when the edition rolled around to 5th edition in 1996, things changed.  Not in terms of the rules (the big change there was reserved for 6th edition, when the pejoratively named 5th edition Herohammer put its emphasis back on troops instead of heroes and monsters so much) but with undead, the army list was split into two lists, which each then developed along separate lines: the Vampire Counts and the Tomb Kings.

The Vampire Counts was the more European undead concepts, and had very Transylvania feel to it.  Vampires (needless to say) led the armies.  Most of the old army list for Undead ended up here, because as you'd expect for a game made in Europe by Europeans and for Europeans (and to some extent, their diaspora cousins like us Americans), the largely European folklore stuff ended up in an army that had a European theme.  The Tomb Kings, which came out later, as led by Liches rather than vampires, and focused on skeletal and animated golem-like creatures.  In fact, if I remember correctly, the dry bones vs rotting corpse theme even went to the most basic of troop types, and Vampire Counts had zombies while the Tomb Kings had skeletons.

At the end of 8th edition, the End Times event created a few new army lists, including a newly consolidated Undead, led by Nagash himself, and his mortarchs, or greatest generals.  Mostly it combined the two armies, but introduced a few unique new troop types; although by troop I mostly mean big monsters and flavorful characters rather than grunts (or whatever sound Undead make.)  When Warhammer was rebooted as Age of Sigmar, this newly consolidated Undead army list came with it.  But eventually, two separate spin-off army lists with an Undead theme came to be, although they're not exactly the same two themes as Vampire Counts and Tomb Kings.  Not only that, they didn't supercede the Undead army list; they supplemented it, mostly by adding new troops rather than coopting existing troops (although some of that happened too.)

These two are the Flesh-Eater Courts and the Nighthaunts.  The former take the ghouls and vampires and combine them.  There is precious little of the urbane, suave, sexy vampire left, and none in this army list ("soulblight" vampires are still around as the more classic Dracula, I suppose.  But even Mannfred von Carstein's model is now bald and pointy-eared, for example.)  The Nighthaunt army, on the other hand, is all ghosts in their many variations.

With so many new concepts floating around for me to potentially convert, I'm tempted to go through them again, but I'll reiterate (and slightly revise) my earlier thoughts on the question: there are only a few kinds of undead, and giving them new visuals and a few unique special abilities doesn't really invalidate that.  Let me reiterate the basic "big concepts" in Undeath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I might go through the lists and see what I want to specifically look at adapting in some fashion into DH5, given that Timischburg is still the seed from which DH4 migrated into DH5, and undead and supernatural horror elements are therefore a major theme in DH5.  We'll see.

Friday Art Attack

The other other major foe I love to introduce in fantasy (after evil people and undead) is, of course, demons and devils.  Which, prior to D&D, were seen as interchangeable terms; I tend to see them as such still and reject the oversplitting of D&D. 

Of course, I'm not alone in thinking so.  After we got treated to a relatively long section on escaping the horrors of Undead in the first half of Fellowship of the Rings, we got the balrog.  The balrog was a pretty iconic hat tip to Christian folklore about the nature of devils, of course, and it has been many times imitated.  The image above is a bloodthirster, a fake balrog from Warhammer, fighting a fantasy version of a space marine on a dragon.

D&D's fake balrog is even more overt; it was literally called a balrog until copyright concerns convinced them to change the name to balor, just in case.

Of course, I can hardly complain.  I've got one too.

I'm moving away from the archetype of the sexy, charismatic vampire to one that's more feral and monstrous.  Sure, they can probably put out a good illusion and deception here and there, but mostly these are monstrous, supernatural, undead predators.  Making vampires sexy again was one of the worst ideas ever come up with. No surprises that it's bored housewives like Ann Rice and Stephanie Meyer who've foisted that atrocious theme on all of us.

Graz'zt and his throne room.

I'll get more into this in a separate post, but there have been major changes (i.e., new developments) in Warhammer.  I don't really pay all that much attention to Warhammer, and I'm still a bit lost on what the devil is supposed to have happened to the old setting and what the new setting is really all about, but as usual, they've got some cool new models, and some art to go with them, especially (lately) with regards to Undead.  Warhammer (and now Iron Kingdoms) are both, by their nature, focused on army type stories and whatnot, which isn't really my thing—I like my fantasy to be a bit less epic and more personal, most of the time. 

Well, I had the 5e balor above; why not add the devilish counterpart; the pit fiend?  Another slightly different ake on the balrog archetype from D&D. 

Both of those illustrations downplay the shadow aspect, though, which is the second half of the balrog, because they are more focused on the flame half.  This one does the opposite.

Occasionally D&D actually does something cool with a more esoteric concept from mythology, like this illustration of a hecatoncheires, or hundred-handed one.

What if instead of wings, the balrog was a gorilla?

Aaaand.... another demon.  A shadow demon this time.

I kind of imagine that anyone who's more than a dabbler in the mystic arts in Dark•Heritage ends up like this guy eventually.  Monstrous, post-human, and scary.

I've got big plans for ghouls, actually, in Dark•Heritage.  If you're familiar with DH4's take on the Cannibal Isles and can draw the connection between them and the current Cursed race, as well as being familiar with a recent development in the Warhammer New setting which parallels some stuff I've been doing, you'll not be surprised by it.  But you'll see in a future post or two what I've got in mind.

I can't help it.  Gerard Butler is, of course, a Scottish guy, not a Greek.  But as I've said before, and it's not just me saying it, there is ample evidence that the aristocracy of ancient Greece, until it was miscegenated out of existence, had typical Yamnaya physical features.  Given that the current Scottish race is the closest genetically to the old Yamnaya prototype, maybe casting a Scot as King Leonidas was a brilliant move after all!

As an aside, the Athenians were, by their own admission, mostly Pelasgian in descent.  The Spartans were the more "authentic" Greeks.  If that means anything significant, which I doubt.

And finally; fantasy apes as orcs.  Another conceit of mine that I'm on the fence about, but which I may well end up using.

DH5 Undead

It's no surprise.  I love undead.  However, I also think that in games like D&D, they're oversplit and over-statted.  While adding some unique abilities or quirks to unique undead appearing in a module or adventure is always a good idea, having a gazillion types of undead in your monster books, most of whom are variations on—at most—half a dozen identical concepts, is a bad idea.  Dark•Heritage 2.0 (technically 2.2 right now) has the following statted undead in its monster list:

• Fell Ghast—an undead dragon, essentially.
• Ghost—with an a la carte suite of abilities to choose from that create wraiths, banshees, spectres, etc. which are all unique incorporeal undead in D&D.
• Ghoul—cannibalistic undead, much as they are in D&D or Warhammer.
• Ghoul Hound—is to wolves or hyenas or something what ghouls are to people.
• Golem, Flesh—I don't make the distinction between constructs and undead that D&D does.  Especially one made out of cadavers.  If it looks like the undead (and smells like the undead) might as well call it undead.
• Headless Horseman—granted; I could simply have made this a ghost.  But I like the concept too much to have not made it a unique stat-line.
• Lich—pretty much exactly what you'd expect; evil sorcerers who've made themselves into undead immortals.
• Mummy—also, pretty much exactly as you'd expect.  Another potential end-game for an evil sorcerer, although most mummies are created by curses bestowed on the unwilling.
• Nizrekh Royal Heresiarch—maybe too unique to have merited inclusion in the main monster list; kind of combines the worst aspects of liches and vampires into one super-powerful foe.
• Skeleton—yeah, pretty basic stuff.  Slower and less graceful than the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, but basically the same idea.
• Vampire—pretty much the Bram Stoker version of Dracula turned into a fantasy monster.
• Wight—the barrow-wight of Tolkien fame, which is the land-draugr of Norse mythology.

I don't think I'm missing anything really crucial from the list of "standard" undead except for zombie, but that's why I have flesh golem (I prefer the more Haitian voodoo Serpent and the Rainbow type zombie—but a "regular" zombie is just a skeleton that's not as rotted.  Maybe skeleton would have been better as something more generic like "walking corpse"), and I do, in fact, have a handful of unique guys, or at least unusual ones.  Most of what else I might need can be created pretty simply by taking the stat above that is closest to the same concept and making slight modifications to it.  Need a Ringwraith?  Take a royal heresiarch and give it a ghost ability or two.  Or simply take a ghost and give it all of the abilities you need to feel like a ringwraith.  Anyway, I also don't think that there needs to be too much standardization to this stuff.  Much of the various illustrations of undead that you see out there can be adopted to these stats.  There doesn't need to be the "iconic" image of a wight, for instance, and something else that looks different can't be a wight.  A lot of the diversity in undead stats comes from merely assuming that different visual cues require different stats.

But to demonstrate, let me pull up some of my favorite WAR artwork featuring undead and show how they can be used with my stats, starting with the image I used yesterday.

These poor dwarves getting overrun by the undead are really facing maybe four different types.  The one most to the left, with the black cloak and an ax simply looks a little too imposing to me to be merely a skeleton (as the guy immediately to his southeast obviously is, with the sword above his head.)  I'd probably call him a wight.  Just to the right of the skeleton is a ghoul (lower) and a ghost (upper) while above the ghost are probably two skeletons, although maybe the cloaked one is another wight.

Wights, skeletons, ghouls and ghosts.

These are fairly run of the mill undead as far as undead go.  Basic and common, as it were.  Now granted; I don't think undead ever should feel basic, common, or run of the mill.  If they do, the fault is you (or your GM) who's not running them right.  The only possible exception to that might be skeletons and zombies, which have developed over time a trope of being hordes of run of the mill savage, mindless creatures that merely need to be slaughtered en masse.  But I don't really love that trope either, to be honest with you, and prefer undead to always be scary, freaky, unique, and monstrous.  While in D&D, a wight might not be a terribly intimidating or unique foe, remember how they felt in Fellowship of the Ring?  That's what you should be doing with your undead.  Otherwise, just use mean people as your villains, fer cryin' out loud.

Which shouldn't be overlooked as a thing, by the way.  I think a lot of people underestimate just making villains be nothing more than mean people who act villainously, instead of having to make them literally be monsters.  Especially if we're talking about using them as tactical gamist pieces. 

Well, on the other hand, if that's all you want from them, making them monsters is just fine.  My approach to gaming is driven strongly by the fact that my entrance into the hobby was through the vector of being a fan of fantasy fiction.  So, to me, the game output had better come closest to resembling fiction as it can, and the more it does so, the better I like it.  Contrary to popular (and thoughtless) belief, that doesn't make me a "story-gamer;" rather, it merely makes me not a rabid sandboxer.  The Chris Perkins school of DMing, as described in his long-running Dragon Magazine column "The DM Experience" describes my style better that just about anything else I've read, even though it's a specifically 4e column.  Ray Winninger's DungeonCraft series does a pretty good job too.

See, now the undead dragon, on the other hand, is always weird and scary.  Granted, in D&D, that usually means that they are merely a tactically interesting high level opponent.  But this is a problem with the paradigm of D&D.  One of the main themes of my blog, not that I always talk about it, but it's lingering there in the background, is that when you borrow something from the horror genre into your fantasy, you should maintain its ambiance of horror along with it.  That's why I have the tagline under the blog title of "d20 rules, Call of Cthulhu play paradigm" (Although m20 is certainly a highly derived variety of d20, and that's the only kind of d20 that I still use anymore.)  The tagline under the rules for Dark•Heritage is + fantasy + horror + madness + which of course is the same theme.

But pulling off dark fantasy can often be much easier said than done.  How do you make a big scary monster actually a big scary monster with overtones of horror instead of an exciting challenge that makes your players shout "huzzah!" and charge recklessly into combat?  Anyway, I don't want to get diverted into talking about that right now, and I've done so in the past to my satisfaction already anyway.

I'll point out that I created the fell ghast not to imitate the dracolich from D&D specifically, but actually the terrorgheist from Warhammer.  Of course, the two already look very similar to each other, and are two iterations of the same concept, so maybe my fell ghast straddles the line somewhat.  I'll also point out that my dragons are more like terrible magical beasts; cunning, but not Machiavellian geniuses with all kinds of magical powers other than their terrible fiery (or other, on occasion) breath.  It seems like maybe post 3e, D&D pulled back from making creatures like dragons (and demons, and other traditionally high level foes) so complicated to run and even to imagine, and boiled them down to their core conceit a little better.  I'd like to think that I independently arrived at the same place after taking a serious look at the stats for such beasties and deciding that I'd never want to run such a thing, no matter how cool the concept of the creature was, but really, I can hardly take credit for having thought of something so obvious, I don't think.

Not that I wouldn't wish to.  But in honesty, I can't.

Now, I just kind of dismissed the notion of zombies as being scary, but of course, they can be, even if the theme of a zombie apocalypse is so overdone that it's become a literal joke that people talk about all the time.  Here's a WAR piece from Paizo illustrating a zombie horde that illustrates how best to make it work: 1) it's never-ending, and while individual zombies are not hard to kill (again) the overall experience is desperate, bleak and hopeless, 2) set it in a suitably spooky setting, even if such a setting is cliche.  Cliche often exists precisely because it works so well.  Cliche with a twist is often more interesting than avoiding cliche altogether.

Curiously, in this next picture, WAR doesn't do the best job of evoking the setting (why is there daylight all around, for one thing?) and it has more of a D&D kind of vibe—huzzah, the boss monsters! than I would like.  But it's still a nice image of some of our upper level undead; a lich and his vampire lieutenant, with a zombie/skeleton bodyguard and maybe a ghoul or two thrown in for some variety.

And this last one is definitely too pulpy and huzzah to be proper dark fantasy, but that doesn't make it any less awesome.  Karrnath, from Eberron, is the quintessential vampire kingdom, and it had some no small part in inspiring me as I was creating Tarush Noptii, which later evolved into Timischburg.  My first incarnation was that it was ruled openly by vampires (borrowed more from a blurb from the 4e book, Open Grave, which I've actually never read), but gradually started to borrow more from Karrnath as it went on, because I liked it better.  Then it went on to more openly imitate Ustalov rather than either, but it's probably fair to say that all of them rolled up into one makes a pretty close analog to Timischburg.