Jedi and Sith as sword & sorcery sorcerers rather than heroic warrior monks?

This is going to be a little bit roundabout, but let me set some context for an idea I've had that would alter a major guiding principle of Space Opera X and change a lot about how I see the setting, and therefore how it gets presented. Before I get to the punchline, though, I'll need to spend some time winding the thing up. Also, here's a video of Tim Kask, the first employee of TSR back in the 70s, talking about life at TSR and in D&D in the first few years of its existence. Not only is this an interesting little video in its own right, but it'll become relevant down below. Watch it, and log away what Tim says.

It's no secret that George Lucas was a big fan of Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies, and that in his earliest drafts, the Jedi order resembled the samurai of movies like Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo and Seven Samurai much more than they eventually later did. Although echoes of this samurai past still stick with them. Originally Jedi weren't superheroes at all, and there isn't much—if any—hint of mystical super powers that they had, at least in the earliest versions of the scripts. They were just honor-bound warrior clans or organizations, and the Jedi and Sith were rivals here. The original Sith warrior was actually not Darth Vader in these early drafts, but Valorum, a Sith Knight who is demoted for some failure and eventually joins the rebels. Valorum is later renamed Dodona, and Espaa Valorum is later the head of the Empire, or at least the Sith clan. In the Star Wars graphic novel by Dark Horse based on these early versions of the script, Valorum is certainly a villain, but he's a relatively honorable one, who's more interested in dueling honorably with Starkiller (the early version of Luke Skywalker) then he is on advancing what he sees as grasping and puerile goals of the Imperial bureaucracy.

It's also worth noting that there was a lot less difference between the Jedi, the Sith and everyone else. There's concept art by MacQuarrie showing stormtroopers with lightsabers (and shields!), as well as the original concept painting for Darth Vader which shows him sporting a blaster pistol on his leg; as much like a black hat gunfighter from a Western movie as like a samurai or mystic warrior.

By the time we get to the novelization and the movie as presented in theaters, both the Jedi and the Sith had undergone a major change. The lightsaber becomes their signature weapon, that nobody else uses. Belief in the Force is an "ancient religion" that most people are skeptical of, even when they know what Darth Vader can do, for instance. Obiwan becomes, by necessity of George Lucas' idea to modify his plot to conform to his interpretation of Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey*" plot arc, a wizardly mentor figure, so he has to have some magical powers. It's worth noting that in the first movie especially, but in the original trilogy overall, these magical powers are much more subtle and modest then they later end up being.

But this was a major change to the setting, to the nature of both the Jedi and the Sith, and to the idea that it faithfully represents the samurai ethos at all anymore. The Jedi and Sith as rival samurai clans idea never really recovers, they neither really resemble samurai all that much anymore. For that matter, the plot doesn't resemble the samurai movies much anymore either. When people tell you that Star Wars is basically a remake of The Hidden Fortress, that's now a reliable tell that they're midwits (at best) parroting something that they've heard in an attempt to sound smart and name-drop, but that they don't actually understand what they're claiming at all. Star Wars has very little resemblance to The Hidden Fortress; it's more like after a lengthy introduction, a remake of Where Eagles Dare spliced to a remake of 633 Squadron. But that's stretching it. It's not a remake of anything, just because it borrows some sequences and plot points.

While we're treated to an escalation of Force superpowers in the next two movies, that's in an attempt to raise the stakes. Darth Vader throwing things at Luke with the Force while swordfighting is supposed to be impressive because we didn't imagine that that could be done. Same with Yoda pulling up an X-wing out of the pond. Later, when the Emperor shows remarkable precognitive powers (although fallible ones, obviously) as well as shooting lightning out of his hands, that's supposed to shock us (no pun intended) because, again, we had no idea that something like that could be done. The Force superpowers remain relatively modest throughout the original trilogy, and those we see using the force in these remarkable ways are (other than Luke himself) presented as true prodigies of force power anyway; much greater than the run-of-the-mill Jedi or Sith would have been. Although that presentation is a bit implicit rather than explicit.

Unfortunately, then George Lucas made another major change to Jedi between the Original Trilogy and the Prequel trilogy, and turned them overtly into superheroes. It's not just the Force, but the lightsabers are escalated immediately. Right off the bat, we're told that lightsabers can now cut through thick blast doors. Funny; I don't remember Darth Vader thinking of doing that when Luke and Co. were escaping the Death Star and he was cut off from them by a blast door. Dooku throws around lightning like its throwing a football in the backyard, Yoda doesn't just strain, struggle and pull an X-wing out of the swamp, he rather casually catches a falling cavern ceiling and throws it aside to save Obiwan and Anakin's life. Even within the prequels we see this escalation; when Obiwan and Qui-Gonn are stopped by destroyer droids in the first sequence of Phantom Menace, we later see Jedi and even clone troopers treating destroyers as if—in the immortal words of Ryan George's Pitch Meetings—they're super easy; barely an inconvenience. If the prequels weren't bad enough—and they were—then other media from this same era is even worse. The Starkiller character from the Force Unleashed video games raises his hands, uses the force, and pulls a freakin' Star Destroyer out of space and crashes it to the surface of the planet he's on. 

Somewhere around here, it occurred to me that Star Wars had become an overtly superhero story, even though people like Dave Filoni and others in featurettes and interviews explicitly denied it. The Jedi and the Sith were like the X-men or the Avengers; completely disconnected from normal people altogether. They also developed a bit of the Superman problem, i.e., the only kinds of stories you can tell about Superman are ones where his dedication to his ideals are tested, because those ideals conflict with him using his deus ex machina powers to easily and handily solve literally every problem that ever comes his way. Watching some of the episodes of The Clone Wars which was the follow-up media to the prequel movies themselves, it occurred to me that most of them were really boring, because the Jedi never even struggled to overcome all of the challenges thrown at them. There were no real stakes anymore; they were just going through the motions of making action sequences. Using your lightsaber to fight off enemies is supposed to be cool, but they had all of the excitement of the Jedi using a lightbroom to clean up their rooms. 

When I created my own Star Wars Revisited stuff for homebrew RPG use, which later lost the Star Wars IP connotation specifically and became Ad Astra and then Space Opera X, my analogs to the Jedi and Sith were always supposed to be more like the original trilogy version, and I actually made that explicitly clearly stated. The rest of the characters were equally competent swashbuckling heroes; if the Jedi had modest magical powers, the others were still Batman and Captain America or whatever and could stand toe to toe with them even without magical powers. I wanted to seriously de-escalate the power creep of the Jedi. Which wasn't really so much of a creep as it was an abrupt shift during the prequel era.

But now comes the time to think about what Tim Kask said about Gary Gygax and what he thought. Remember that from the little video up above? Star Wars as a high concept world-buildling episode could be seen as a three-legged stool. One leg was space opera, one leg was superhero stories, and the other leg was high fantasy. The setting superficially resembled space opera and takes place in space, but once you get rid of the superficial trappings, it's a combination of Old West American frontier and Medievalism, the plots are very high fantasy, and the characters have superpowers like the Justice League or the Avengers. Well, maybe Justice League is a bit much, but like the X-men at least.

But what if Space Opera X were more like a three-legged stool of space opera, the Old West, and sword & sorcery of the kind that Gary Gygax claimed he was modeling D&D on? Specifically the Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber kind, who are the two most iconic authors in the genre? And like with Gary Gygax, who failed to really understand why anyone would want to play a wizard or an elf when you could play a more down-to-earth heroic figure, what if the Jedi and Sith were treated much more like the sorcerers of Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber than like actual protagonists? In Howard, they're almost always villainous. Leiber has friendlier sorcerers; the Gray Mouser actually apprentices under one briefly and has a few modest magical tricks up his sleeve from time to time, and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes tend to be sponsors and patrons of the two main characters. Although they're weird. They're inhuman, and bizarre, and inscrutable. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never really trust them, because they can never understand them. 

I don't know that that changes the way the game would work, at all. In fact, I don't see any reason why it should. But it is a major change to the worldbuilding side, if my Knights and Warlocks are much more rare, and much more inscrutable, and are usually played more like plot devices than like characters. Heck, there may well be something about them that specifically makes them go insane over time, or at least become trans-human creeps. While Star Wars has gradually become the story of Jedi and Sith, with everyone else kind of falling into the background (even The Mandalorian and its sad Boba Fett spin-off are not immune from this, although they should be from a structural standpoint. I think the writers just can't help making it all about the Jedi and Sith) Space Opera X, on the other hand, would specifically be about swashbuckling "normal" people, with the magic-users being relegated to more of a plot-devicey role most of the time. 

* I'm not really very impressed with Campbell's "The Hero's Journey" and I see the name-dropping of it as a red flag that I'm dealing with a midwit who greatly overestimates his own intelligence. The plot arc and the archetypal characters are not actually nearly as ubiquitous as its adherents claim, and they often struggle to name anything other than Star Wars itself that really fits it very well. They're certainly common, but that's a far cry from universal, and they often appear without the rest of the "Hero's Journey" package, which defeats the purpose of the the model. I also think that the plot outline of "The Hero's Journey" is so reduced to banality that it says very little to point out obvious similarities that it posits. Mostly, Joseph Campbell is a tool for the self-important to flatter themselves that they are intelligent and academic without them actually having to be intelligent or academic, or even to know very much about what they're talking about. If you want to work in this same space but actually read someone who's said something more interesting, then check out the work of Georges Dumezil. It's still a just-so story, but it's fundamentally a much more serious and interesting just-so story than the one Campbell has pushed on us.

It's also interesting that those very interested in showing how academic they are by referring to Campbell and the monomyth are completely unaware that the monomyth is very much out of favor and has been for decades in the field of comparative mythology.

Some Gunslinger archetypes

I created these for a video. I have a few more, but I didn't want to overdo it. I'll describe each archetype more in detail when I do a post specifically about it. This is my semi-retired Gunslinger, Luke, on a lightly terraformed Mars lookalike planet called Ossus.

ICE PIRATE

PROSPEROUS FREE TRADER

DANGEROUS STRANGER

QUICKDRAW DUELIST

MASKED OUTLAW

HOTRODDER

Planetary Data Sheets

I don't intend to announce this every time I make a change, but I've revitalized my setting development a bit for Space Opera X. It was originally developed on my other blog; I'm now mostly doing it on my Google Sites, where the updates are harder to spot. That's OK. I'm doing it for my own benefit, not for public consumption. The latter, if it happens, is merely serendipitous. I may export that to some other format, however, if I can find an easy way to do it (Google Takeout, maybe?) I don't really want all this work to be online on a free site where, as I've seen way back as far as Geocities, it could be taken away at any time and I'm left high and dry. As offline documents, I'm in much better shape. I'm not updating my map online necessarily either, just offline. And I created an offline LibreOffice Calc (instead of Google Sheets) listing of all my systems, so I can sort it and work on it as needed. I've color coded the hexes that have a data sheet, as well as those that are "higher priority" to get one done as well. I forgot how much fun I have just playing around and building in this sandbox. But I'm also constantly motivated, when doing so, to do something else besides tinkering with setting development, especially in an environment where it's only for me as a hobby or game in my own mind. In other words, my much-ballyhooed stories that I keep talking about wanting to write in my settings; I need to actual sit down and write some. The same is true of my Dark Fantasy X stuff, but my return to Star Wars: The Old Republic has me more in a space opera mood at the moment.

I'm also considering renaming the Carrick Grand Marches. I don't remember now if it is a coincidence, or subconscious, or if I actually literally borrowed the name Carrick from Carrick Station, the "Republic Fleet"'s official name when you're on it, but I'm less and less happy with the idea. But, to be honest with you, while I originally envisioned the Carrick Grand Marches as the "protagonist" region of the setting, I'm kind of migrating somewhat to some of the other Bernese Colonies, or even some of the non-Bernese worlds as a better choice. 

I also, as I was going through my map and making my spreadsheet, noticed a few minor errors. An uncolored hex here and there. One hex that was mislabeled; instead of 1730, it was located in hex 1630, for instance. Which do I want to keep; update the map, or update the data sheet? Minor stuff. Yet another reason to keep it offline.

Reptomammals

I've made a few references to reptomammals before. Obviously, in real life there's no such thing; an animal can be a reptile or a mammal but not both. But reptomammals are a legacy of a Golden Age of  Technology at the dawn of the Old Kingdoms era, or even before. In contrast, Space Opera X takes place in what is relatively speaking a Dark Age. Genetically engineered wildlife that was part of the plan for terraforming worlds, reptomammals were created by these early people to serve as domestic animals as well as to be released into the wild to create stable ecosystems that would later benefit the colonists who were to settle on these terraformed planets. The gene-splicing technology that would allow these early spacers to create all new creatures with features from reptiles and mammals, yet uniquely adapted to these newly terraformed worlds is long lost, as is the terraforming process itself, but through good old fashioned animal husbandry and breeding, as well as the genetic malleability and instability of the reptomammals in general, they have yet developed into a varied and broad set of animals seen on most Colonial worlds, or even on worlds of "natives" who were there since the times of first contact.

Because of these broad similarities, people tend to use the same word to refer to differing creatures on various worlds that serve a similar function, or who were bred from what was apparently a similar (or even the exact same) reptomammalian template. The words are traditional and very old, and few people have the foggiest idea where they came from, but the roots of the words can be traced, again, to the earliest spread of Earth-descent humanity. That said, between you and me, they do not use words like "horse" or "dog" or "buffalo" to refer to animals that play a similar role in their planetary ecosystems, because that's just too prosaic for my taste. So, I've mostly used words created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his two great (and public domain) planetary romance series. These include the following:

• banth - any large, four-legged predatory creature, superficially similar to lions or tigers in many respects except usually larger
• basto - a cattle or buffalo like creature, used for leather, fur, milk and meat
• calot - any more modestly sized pack hunting creatures in the ecological role of a wolf or hyena. Also used for domestic "dogs"
• kazar - an unusual form, known for its powerful short somewhat parrot-like beak. They usually are about sheep-sized and omnivorous, like a woolly Protoceratops and sometimes are domesticated for their wool, but on other worlds are only wild animals. On some worlds they've even developed lean, obligate carnivorous forms.
• mistal - one of two basic forms that serve as small domesticated animals. This one tends to be furry and "cute" but will root out and eat small pests. In other words, a space cat.
• rotik - known as "sea serpents" but in reality show a remarkable diversity of form. They are all, however, very large aquatic animals, and in very few cases is there any domestication of them.
• sorak - another small domesticated animal, although this one tends to focus more on the scales than the fur, and is somewhat less "cute." Still, soraks and mistals serve similar purposes. It's not clear why the ancients developed two templates for a similar function.
• targo - a variety of creatures that are known for their many eyes as a defining feature. They can range from the size of a rat to the size of a wolf. In addition to their spider-like eyes, they do, as it happens, produce a silk-like thread, which is sometimes harvested in domesticated versions of this animal, but they are dangerous for the unwary to keep, and when gone feral, they quickly turn predatory and dangerous.
• tharban - an often striped, solitary hunter. Not as large as the banths, but usually larger than calots, and only infrequently have they been successfully domesticated. Its theorized that they were developed, like the banths, for ecosystem control and to keep grazers like baso or kazars from over-running ecosystems due to lack of predation.
• thoat - a very wide variety of beast of burden. Some are similar to the basto, but they have less of a "cattle" like vibe, and more of a "horse"like vibe. That doesn't mean that they play the role of horses exactly; they can be as large and un-horselike as a dewback on one extreme. Sometimes, even two-legged animals that are similarly used as riding beasts of burden are called two-legged thoats, but that usage is not universal
• ulsio - a creature who's original purpose is unknown, but which has become a pest across many worlds, possibly as a result of an "inevitable" mutation that drives reptomammals to produce something like this in many worlds regardless of the designs of the original terraformers. Like a rat, these omnivores get into crops, eat carrion, threaten small children, and generally make a pest of themselves. Mistals and soraks are somewhat effective at controlling the population of smaller ones, but on some worlds they have become large enough to be immune to predation by those animals. Occasionally domesticated calots will deal with them in that case.
• vere - a "land crocodile" or rauisuchid-like animal. Or perhaps comparable to Megalania. Another hunting alternative to the calots, tharbans and banths. 
• zitidar - large, elephant-sized creatures. Sometimes domesticated, sometimes wild. Because of their large size, when fully grown they are immune to predation by all but the very largest and fiercest of banths.
• zorat - another modest-sized beast of burden. A "space donkey". Not generally capable of being ridden long distances, but on worlds where beasts of burden still get used for these kinds of things, they often are parts of caravans, carrying loads across the countryside.

Wasteland Deadeye

I'm using my semi-retired SWTOR character John (J'ohhn) to model some iconics for Space Opera X. For those curious, the actual outfit and get-up is the following:

- Inscrutable Pursuer's Facemask

- Remnant Underworld Consular's Robe

- Nefarious Bandit's Gloves (hides bracers, so it doesn't matter what you use)

- Stalker's Belt

- Steadfast Master's Leggings

- Remnant Resurrected Smuggler's Boots

- BL-28 Sniper Rifle

It's admittedly a strange one; a robed and hooded sniper character who looks more at home deep in the deserts of Tatooine than in the headquarters of Imperial Intelligence, but that's exactly why I love the concept for Space Opera X.

The WASTELAND DEADEYE is not an iconic character, but rather a very specific archetype that you might find in Space Opera X. A colonist, or perhaps a spacer who's "gone native" and now lives with colonists or other planetary natives, the deadeye lives in a place with probably a rather harsh climate, poor access to advanced technology, and low population density. He's the iconic rugged individualist who sympathizes with other rugged individualists on his planet, and has little patience for the greater spacefaring galaxy and its problems.

His accoutrements will be an eclectic mixture of once top-of-the-line technology that has been scavenged or preserved from days gone by (or even generations gone by, in some cases) and home-made, or local made at least, items that are more humble and easily obtained without access to galactic trade lanes. As shown, he's got an old soldier's faceplate and a few other pieces, including war surplus naval boots and a radium long-arm that's not exactly an antique, but which is an older style, with rudwood polished smooth from many years of handling, oiling, and cleaning. It's well-used, but well-cared for. He's also got local rough woolen robes to protect from the harsh environment; wind-blown sand, grit and dust being a likely everyday hazard.

Here he's shown going into town to do some shopping. "Town" being a rather modest place in this instance, but likely the largest population center he's going to  prefer to be a part of.

Although he might have an older transport of some kind, as shown below, he's even more likely to have a local beast of burden to ride on, such as the image below that, of him seated on a four-legged thoat template reptomammal that's native to his planet of choice.

You may think that this archetype isn't very suited for adventure, but you'd be wrong. The wasteland deadeye knows the backcountry of his planet very well, and is most likely highly skilled in outdoorscraft, hunting, lo-fi navigation, and the location of hidden and secret areas. He may even have come here specifically for that; many wasteland deadeyes are former spacers who have "retired" at a young age to take up a career in archaeology, animal husbandry, or even treasure hunting. Given the many sources on most colonial worlds of odd, unusual, and dangerous wildlife, ruins, aliens, bandits, space-faring pirates, or space-faring people in general who are harassing or hassling the locals (on purpose or otherwise) the wasteland deadeye is going to be someone who's good graces you can court to your benefit, or who you can annoy, and find yourself on the wrong end of a long-distance sniper shot. The Deadeye is not the stereotype of the hapless and helpless villager or farmer, but rather a strong, capable and competent expert on his planet who may well have a chip on his shoulder about outsiders and their intentions. 

Some are just tough and adventurous locals or natives of their planets, but some have adopted their new homeland after serving some time in a spacefaring navy, merchant marine, or other similar career. Never expect the wasteland deadeye to be a naïve, simple country fellow; they tend to be shrewd, cunning, intelligent, better educated and informed than you'd expect, often more well-traveled in their past than you'd think—but they turned their backs on that life for a reason, and now live as hunters, homesteaders, marshals or sheriffs of small towns, or other such pursuits. Some even become wandering privatized law enforcement; bounty hunters, essentially, ridding small communities of the troublesome who prey on them as a way of making a modest, solitary living.

Wasteland Deadeyes tend to be loners much of the time, although they're friendly enough with the people that they consider part of their "community"—however they define that—and those who are friendly or useful to the community. They tend to be men of higher than average integrity, honor and bravery. The latter by dint of their chosen way of life, but the former two is often what leads them to it in the first place. Although often found alone, they also frequently have the company of several domesticated animals; either those that they raise for food or fur or whatever other resource they provide, but more congenially, companions and working animals such as guard calots or thoats for riding. They may also have some bots or two on their premises or with them, sometimes with eccentric personalities due to clutter as they are often fairly old, and the deadeyes infrequently bother with defragging or restaging their robo-brains. Don't ever think that just because a wasteland deadeye is "alone" that he really truly is. 

Here's a few more images and details about one example of this archetype. Partly because I realized I didn't have any images with the gun out, although I talked about it.

A homestead where this guy occasionally stops by to keep an eye on a widow and her family. This particular example of the archetype doesn't have a home per se; he's more of a wanderer with a wagon or space-faring Airstream that a four-legged thoat pulls. He also has a speeder that he can get around with more quickly. He has a broad area of his "territory" that he patrols regularly, as a semi-official marshal of the area. Most of the other homesteaders recognize his authority and good intentions, but he doesn't actually have an official position, because the area in which he lives doesn't actually have an official government to assign one to him. Sounds like paradise to me.

Although this marshal has been here patrolling this territory for over five years now, he's not actually a native. Here he is near the wreck of the ship that brought him here and left him here, looking for items to scavenge for his own convenience, or to sell to someone else. Because it went down in a vast, uncharted area of sand dunes, nobody has yet discovered its location or scavenged it more thoroughly, so he still returns to it from time to time to find things. He actually uses it for shelter during the worst part of the season, and has placed a short-range claim beacon in the area asserting that it is his and that anyone who takes anything from it will be considered a thief and dealt with accordingly. 

I'm actually on the lookout to generate a world for this guy to live on, because as I've been working on him, I've gradually started to crystalize some worldbuilding in my head. Although I'm using Tatooine to stand in for it in the images, there are a number of things about Tatooine that I don't like for this world. Tatooine is a great spot for image screenshots, though, because the lighting is so good there compared to many of the alternatives. I imagine a less desolate place in general, although still dominated by deserts; a 20-30% surface water world, with cooler rather than hotter temperatures. Not in astronomical terms; still within the range of livable conditions for people, but with cold winters and mild summers. I don't think anything in my current Space Opera X catalog quite fits.

Enemy Within

I haven't yet made the update to my undead, but I have continued my deep dive into a number of things related to Warhammer. I decided to read, as best as I could find them, the 4e "director's cut" Enemy Within campaign. This so-called director's cut is massive; no less than ten ~125-150 page hardback books (or pdfs, if you get them that way) in full color, published by Cubicle 7 and written (mostly) by Graeme Davis, who wrote the original Enemy Within campaign in the first place. I don't have all of the books (actually, the last one isn't even available yet, even) so my progress on this may be sporadic, and it might take some time to get through. So far, I'll probably only read what's available on Scribd, and then move forward from there. I've read, so far, the first volume, Enemy in Shadows and about half of the second book, the Enemy in Shadow Companion. There are five modules, and five companion volumes, one corresponding directly to each module. The companions are supplemental materials, everything from more travel tables to roll on to give variety to travel encounters, to alternate and optional NPCs, to "director's commentary" on the module itself.

Now, I've been familiar with Warhammer for a long time, although my familiarity with the role-playing game was not super high. I knew that it was, in many ways, a fairly old-school, wargamey type system in some ways. That it had lots of tables and charts (although not nearly as much as Rolemaster, of course.) I knew that it was "low fantasy" and that character careers weren't things like Wizard or Fighter, but famously much more modest (or sub-modest) things like Rat Catcher, or Beggar, or Grave Robber, etc. But I was always much less interested in the system anyway than I was in the tone of the Warhammer setting as it was developed for the RPG. Which, by necessity, was always a little different than how it developed for the wargame. I'd been familiar with the expression, said by a guy online years ago, but which I thought was very clever, that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was the game where you started off thinking that you were playing Dungeons & Dragons, but before very long, you discovered that you were actually playing Call of Cthulhu. 

As some of the discussion in the Enemy in Shadows Companion says, this is actually more literally true than I ever imagined. When Bryan Ansell, the original owner of Games Workshop when it was still a scrappy independent little company, tasked some of his folks to write WFRP, his mandate was to write a Cthulhu adventure for Warhammer. Davis himself notes that at the time (1986 or so) the state of British roleplaying in particular had moved out of the dungeon; Call of Cthulhu was very popular in the British market, and had done a ton for encouraging investigation and NPC interaction. The Thieves' World product was also very successful at the time. It's little surprising then that on reading the first volume (before I read that in the commentary for the companion) that I thought that the adventure felt very little like a D&D adventure and quite a bit like a Cthulhu campaign, although set in a High Middle Ages setting rather than a 1920s or modern setting, and with a lot of tools to encourage people who weren't used to this paradigm to explore almost sandboxy elements too. The closest thing to a dungeon is some sewer exploration, but you just go in looking for clues, not to "clear them" of monsters, or find treasure or secret doors, or traps, or whatever. 

It's probably not surprising, then, that on reading this I started thinking about how I could potentially adapt this campaign to the Dark Fantasy X setting, because given that the themes and tone are quite similar, it seems eminently doable. It would require a lot of serial number filing and changing, but the basic structure of the campaign (so far, I should caveat) as well as the tone and feel is pretty much spot on. There might be more to come here. It's certainly a much better fit than the Paizo adventure paths that I was trying to go through as an earlier project. Even the horror-themed, and even the specifically Cthulhu-themed adventure paths just weren't right in a way that this Warhammer campaign absolutely is. 

A couple of minor points, that are somewhat random. First, I was struck by many adventure action-grrl NPCs are sprinkled throughout the module. I suspect most (but not all) of them are recent additions due to the "remastering' director's cut nature of this. It's not like they didn't exist in the 80s, but there wasn't any push for it, and because most people weren't drowning in delusional wishful thinking about the nature of men vs women, that wasn't really a thing in the 80s. It would have had everyone collectively from the writers to the publishers to the customers all scratching their heads at what the devil was going on, unless these action-grrls were very sporadic and occasional and kind of meant to stand out rather than be routine. I find this very out of synch with the tone of the setting overall, but given the woke nature of the industry, I strongly suspect that I'm swimming upstream in making a big deal out of that. It's not just a bunch of idiosyncratic stronk wammans, though—there are a more than you would expect bizarrely inappropriately added minority characters. In the entirety of the Warhammer setting through the 80s, 90s and maybe even the 00s, I don't recall there ever being a fantasy analog to a sub-Saharan African ever having been made, especially not throwing them in the Empire with pseudo-German names as if they were just as much a part of the Empire as the actual European pseudo-Germans who are the basis for the Empire. They never even made any mention of fake China, fake Japan or the fake Middle East except as a throwaway off-hand reference. (I guess the Total War game has now added a Cathay faction, though. That's new to the setting. Ironically after the setting was basically destroyed by GW. Noice.)

The other thing that struck me, and I'd thought this before—years before, even, although reading this brought the thought back to mind—Cthulhu stories aren't really supposed to be in-joke guided tours of the Mythos. Cthulhu appears as a major factor in all of one story, "The Call of Cthulhu", and then is relegated to an off-hand reference in stories that don't feature him at all. Derleth and other subsequent writers used him somewhat, but the only other time Cthulhu was actually used by one of the OG Mythos writers was when Robert E. Howard used the name with a drastically different spelling as a kind of Atlantean Fu Manchu in his serial Skull-Face. Which I highly recommend that you read; it's a fantastic story, but his interpretation there of Cthulhu is wildly divergent than anything Lovecraft wrote, having in common only the notion that he came from the depths of the sea. All of the Mythos writers did this, actually. Their monsters are singular; they appear as a plot device in one story, and then they are (maybe) referred to off-hand after that, if at all.

This is where most Cthulhu-themed RPG products have gone completely wrong, in trying to make their games like a guided tour of the Mythos rather than the Mythos being more of a theme and approach instead of a specific look at the mi-go, for example, or the dark young of Shub-Niggurath. And this is where Warhammer feels more Lovecraftian in many ways than Call of Cthulhu, even though the Warhammer chaos gods are not really at all like stereotypical Lovecraftian entities. In other ways, though—they're an absolutely perfect fit. 

I do find, however, the puns and pop culture references kind of unusual. The fact that the adventure takes place in the land of the von Saponatheim noble family (say Once Upon a Time in an over-the-top Dracula voice and you'll be right) or that there's character who's very clearly Groucho Marx with even some of his trademarked catch-phrases is... I dunno. I can't decide if it's occasionally clever or off-putting, or both depending on my mood.

Undead in Dark Fantasy X

Undead need a bit of a refresh in Dark Fantasy X, but maybe not Hack Fantasy X. Undead in my rules are basically lifted from the way that they are presented in games like Microlite 20 Purest Essence or Microlite74, i.e., they're D&D Undead.  Which is fine, especially for Hack Fantasy X, which is supposed to be more D&D-like, rather than Dark Fantasy X, which is supposed to be more specifically tailored to the Dark Fantasy X setting. But there's more than that; although the D&D interpretation of many of these Undead is pretty traditional, it's not the only approach. It's not even the only traditional approach, as my recent review of the Warhammer Undead books has shown (to be fair, I already knew this. But I'd never really deep dived into it before.)

While there aren't really any changes that I want to make specifically to incorporate Warhammer Undead-style monsters on the monster list, I think that I do want to rewrite the Undead entries for several of them, based on my review in a more indirect fashion. It just prompted thoughts in my mind about different ways to do it. 

There are three changes in particular that I intend to make, and maybe a fourth:

• I think wights and mummies are redundant. While the imagery associated with each is different, it's really just cultural. Wrap a wight in bandages and put him in a sandy climate, and how is it really at all different than a mummy? From a stat perspective, they are somewhat different, and certainly have a different special ability. I just have to decide which I like better, or put them both in as alternatives that a GM can pick from.
• The Undead traits are really just one trait right now; immunity to mind-affecting spells. I want to also add a few more, although I need to think carefully about exactly what it ends up being.
• Ghoul hounds and flesh hounds might be redundant too. I probably don't really need both. Although maybe I keep them both anyway just for variety.
• Vampires will be significantly rewritten to have an a la carte ability list, sort of like how ghosts are done now. From a setting perspective, vampires will be an evolution of ghouls, but they can go essentially down two parallel paths. I'll probably rename one of those paths vampire, and it will be ghouls who have clawed their way into lucid, civilized (somewhat) behavior and appearance. The other path will be more monstrous, bat-like flying monsters. Maybe I'll call them gar-ghouls or something. I dunno. Draugr? Bloodsaunger? I'll play around with this.

I should probably do something similar for some of the other monster categories, and have a more tailored rather than legacy monster list, but that's a whole nother thing; I'll wait a bit longer. This undead monster list upgrade will move Dark Fantasy X from version 1.0 to 1.1.