Some time ago I was in a conversation with Cole about Nightwick in the very pretentious way I sometimes do and the topic veered into the definition of "Dark Fantasy." It's a genre which I think there is no question that the World of Nightwick occupies, even if it's not always serious. It's also a genre which, 13 years after I first started running Nightwick still has a lot of cultural cachet. If anything it's gotten bigger in this post-Dark Souls/post-Elden Ring world, and I think for someone who works in that medium, even if it's all hack work, it's worth thinking about what it is.
Normally it is defined as "fantasy with horror elements," but very commonly Moorcock's Elric saga is included in Dark Fantasy and I wouldn't say it has horror elements. Cole provided a definition that I think does the wonderful job of including the things people would want to include and excluding what they wouldn't while also being very evocative: Dark Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a world that is haunted.
What does it mean to be haunted? Probably at least in part because of my history background, I am going to be using "haunted" here to mean that it bears the scars of the past - a psychic shock that causes the memories of the dead to cluster there like bats in a cavern and for them to weigh as a nightmare upon the brains of the living. In thinking about this topic outside the realm of games, I have come to see history writing as a sort of ghost story. The crimes of the past have a long reach and haunt us today as much as any specter from the mind of MR James.
In our fantasy game worlds, or fantasy worlds in general, we can achieve this sense of being haunted through the numinous. The psychic scars of the past have physical and spiritual manifestations on the world. In the world of Nightwick, immediately to the northwest of Nightwick Village, is the Mire of Princes - created when the blood of an army facing the Sword Brothers so suffused the ground that it became a marsh ever after. More distantly there is the Blood Red Sea - stained that color after the demon Moloch pitched the men of ancient Acheron into it. And of course there is Nightwick Abbey itself.
If you want to run something that's Dark Fantasy, as seems to still be in vogue, that's how you do it. Think about the history of the setting and how its crimes gnaw away through time into the present. It is a mode of thinking that should be easy to all of us now.
There are times when I desire to run something where the world is less numinous - a lower fantasy where heroes of maybe a Howardian stripe come to grips with monsters of super science - but then I have to write dungeon rooms. It seems my brain is either too choked by the weeds of time and the study of past wrongs or too enamored with the gothic I engaged with in entertainment and saw in the woods where I grew up. But my dungeons are always haunted. Maybe I am too.
I've been meaning to say this for a bit now, but today being Transgender Day of Visibility provides me a convenient excuse and gives me a way to be in solidarity with the rest of the community.
I'm trans. Name's Miranda. Nice to meet you. She/her.
Obviously nothing about the blog or the patreon is really going to change. We're in TTRPGs so your probably used to this kind of thing.
I know I've slowed down recently after a fairly heavy revival in blog activity earlier this year. I'm currently sitting on a bunch of 50% done posts and a mountain of play reports of both the FLGS and online Nightwick games. I hope to get those reports written up and posted in the next few days (likely multiple ones in a day) and then to get to editing the regular posts.
Have I done this post before? Oh kinda! But I want to handle this a little different. This is kind of a combination Appendix N for my current campaign and my history with the Wilderlands. This is partly a response to friend of the blog and longtime online group player Huth's statement that he didn't quite "get" what I was going for. This post is meant to either help him get it or explain why it's difficult to get. I won't be sure which until people read it.
I first found out about the Wilderlands my freshman or sophomore year of college. I was not sure what to run for my college group so on a whim I looked up the wikipedia page for fantasy RPG settings. I saw the name The Wilderlands of High Fantasy and thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. It was so dumb I had to know why someone would name something that. In reasearching it, I found out there was a 3e version of the setting, and since that was the main RPG I ran at the time (it's the one I started with) I looked into it more.
What I found was a lot of people talking about how it was more Swords & Sorcery than a modern D&D setting. It hearkened back to the Old Days, when fantasy and science fiction were not so separate. The days of pulp magazines and bronze age four color fantasy. The days of pulp fantasy. Now at the time I actually had fairly limited experience with the actual texts involved in these statements. I was familiar with pulp sci fi and horror through my love of spaceships, the works of H P Lovecraft, and the book the Art of Imagination, which I was given for Christmas once in high school. I still treasure that book.
I was also familiar with the successors of these forms of adventure fiction, though I wouldn't have recognized the connection at the time: 1950s sci fi and mid-century adventure films. The idea of a setting that felt like that and the appeals to a nostalgia for a past that I never lived in set my mind afire. I was also intrigued by the type of gameplay it promoted that the OSR now calls the "hexcrawl," because it matched the video games I actually liked to play but I had only experienced and run fairly linear storyline stuff before this time.
So I bought the 3e box set. I also bought some of the fiction people said it resembled - most notably the Conan stories of Robert E Howard (specifically the collection with illustrations by Mark Schultz, whose art still defines the Hyborian Age to me). I also picked up the Conan movie because people said it was good, and while I found them very different I enjoyed both immensely.
The box set took some time coming in so for a long while I relied on the free Lenap chapter that was hosted online. Its jungle climate with barren hills and volcanic islands reminded me of Infant Island from Mothra, which made me love it all the more and makes it still one of my favorite areas of the Wilderlands. In fact, it is the basis for a large part of Yavana. However, this campaign ended in a TPK and by then I had gotten a hold of the box set and moved the action to the City State of the Invincible Overlord (with a brief excursion into Tarsh).
An important thing to note, then, is that the Wilderlands was in many ways my introduction to pulp fantasy, though reading Grognardia a few years later would greatly increase the amount I read. It was easier for me to deal with the fact there were weird D&D races that wouldn't normally be in Swords & Sorcery fiction because I didn't yet have a developed enough taste to recognize it. My primary science fantasy D&D alike exposure was the Might & Magic series, and that had elves and dwarves and even minotaurs and vampires in some games and you ended most of them by shooting the boss with rayguns. Heck, in some of the games the elves were even blue, which made it easier to understand the funny colored wilderpeople.
Another thing to note is that I started running the Wilderlands during my college career, where I majored in history and minored in classics (and eventually went on to get an MA in Premodern History). To the Retro Stupid Wilderlands setting I added a great deal of Pretension. The difference between the Skandiks of Croy and Ossary became many of the differences between Vikings and Saxons. The armies of the City State became late Roman in character. I knew enough about Persia to make the connections to the magic archers and name of Viridistan.
A mock cover created by Trey Causey that I think gets the tone Exactly Right
My history with the Wilderlands certainly makes it my most maximalist setting. It is a jambalaya of influences that developed as I ran the setting. My interest in "precious shithole hellscapes" developed after finding Huge Ruined Scott's original Wilderlands OD&D blog and through that the rest of the OSR. That blog is why this blog exists. The tastes I developed through reading OSR blogs led me to trying to decide from the ground up why OD&Disms would be the way they are, based on my own proclivities, which is what led to Nightwick Abbey. I don't design settings the way I did for the relatively blank slate of the Wilderlands material anymore, and I would never put elves in a Swords & Sorcery setting now.
But the Wilderlands is enough part of my D&D DNA now that I can run it without chaffing too much at its contradictions. Things are sometimes the way they are because that's the way they are in the Wilderlands. Elves and Hobbits go steal the jewel from the Tower of the Elephant.
Anyway I mentioned an Appendix N at the beginning so I should probably do one of those. This represents both what I was reading for the original campaign and what I've read since that has been incorporated into my imaginings.
Books
Geary, Patrick - Before France and Germany
Howerd, Robert E. - Almuric, Conan Series***
Jordanes - History of the Goths
Leiber, Fritz - The Sword Series***
Lovecraft, H. P. - "The Mound," At the Mountains of Madness, and other Cthulhu mythos stories.
Smith, Clark Ashton - The Hyperborean and Zothique Cycles*, "The Abominations of Yondo," "The Maze of the Enchanter"*
Moore, C. L. - Jirel of Joiry Series, Northwest of Earth Series
Tolkien, J. R. R. - The Hobbit*
Movies
Atlantis: The Lost Continent
Conan the Barbarian
Deathstalker 2 (and some of the visuals from 1 but man does 1 have too much rape).
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad*
Hawk the Slayer
Hercules in the Haunted World
Jason and the Argonauts
The Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete
Mothra*
Rodan
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad***
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger**
Comics
Conan and Savage Sword of Conan by Marvel
Conan by Dark Horse ElfQuest (currently by Dark Horse)
Godzilla by Dark Horse
Video Games
Elder Scrolls - Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim
Heroes of Might and Magic 2
Might & Magic 1 - 8**
Legend of Zelda - Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time
Sid Meier's Pirates
Wizardry 6
Special Mentions: Basil Paledouris's soundtrack for Coanan the Barbarian, which I listened to while both prepping and running, and My Barbarian's "Unicorns LA" which gives me some of the same weird Nostalgia for Past Times of D&D feels.
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