The East-march and the Glittering Hills

 

The Glittering Hills

Beauty, Burden, and the Fire Beneath

There’s a stretch of land along Aranor’s eastern coast that the Chourdavian crown calls the East-march. Locals call it the Glittering Hills. The name is hopeful—maybe even cruelly so. It evokes light, promise, and wealth. But the truth of the land is toil, silence, and the slow, grinding erosion of order.

The terrain is hilly and scrub-choked, carved with ravines that twist like old scars. The soil is poor. The wind is sharp. The roads are barely roads at all. The region produces a modest yield of gemstones—just enough to tempt miners, not enough to justify civic investment. The crown treats it like a buffer zone. A frontier. A place to tax, not to see.

And lately, something has begun to stir.

---

The Chaos Men

They aren’t coming from the north. They aren’t marching from some distant border. They’re emerging—from within. From the Fell Temple of Zagrath, erected over the broken remains of the Broken God. It lies roughly 500 miles south of the Glittering Hills. The temple was constructed by Zagrathi cultists who seek to unmake the world through entropy—to break it as their dark god is broken.

Now, they’re loosed.

The chaos men are former cultists, twisted by ritual and mythic entropy. Horned, hooved, and marked by mutation. Some bear extra limbs. Some speak in reversed tongues. They don’t conquer. They dissolve. They spread strife, desecrate thresholds, and unravel the quiet testimony of the land.

They call themselves the Unmakers. And they speak of a coming Sundering.

---

Signs in the Hills

It started small. A miner vanished. Shadowy silhouettes cast on ravine walls. A ruined shrine began to glow at dusk. A Preceptor sent to investigate returned silent, then disappeared.

Now, the sightings are growing. The ravines feel older. The wind carries whispers. The hills glitter—but they do not give.

---

The Stones

The gemstones of the Glittering Hills aren’t valuable in bulk. They’re small, flawed, and difficult to extract. But they carry ritual potency. Hedge-workers and itinerant scholars use them in rites of necessity. These aren’t treasures. They’re tools. Testimony. Fragments of a land trying to hold itself together.

Name	Appearance	Use in Magic or Rites
Veilshard	Pale to smoky violet quartz	Used in concealment, dream-walking, or veiling presence. Blurs perception.
Sunderviolet	Deep red garnet with fractures	Burned in severance rituals. Cuts metaphysical ties.
Witchglass	Opaque black tourmaline	Ground for protective circles or entropy-binding. Brittle but potent.
Saltfire	Pale amber citrine	Heated in purification rites. Emits faint light when warmed.
Ravencleft	Iridescent black with blue sheen	Used in shadow-walking or masking magical signatures.
Shardmilk	Translucent white quartz	Dissolved for memory rites or pain-dulling. Ineffective in sunlight.
Graveflint	Ash-grey quartz or spinel	Anchors spirits, binds echoes, stills movement. Cracks render it inert.

Extraction is mostly panning and sifting. Tunnel mining is rare and dangerous. The yield is low. The stones are not wealth—they are witness.

---

Final Thoughts

The Glittering Hills are a threshold. Not between nations, but between states of being. They glitter, yes—but the light is thin. The chaos men seep up from the south, and the land itself seems to hold its breath.

“They do not march. They seep.”
— Carved into the walls of an abandoned mine

Half‑face: Art, Obscurity, and the Veil of Testimony

There’s a movement spreading through Aranor’s noble courts. You’ll find it in tapestries, in portraiture, even in jewelry. It’s called Half‑face—a style, a statement, a quiet obsession.

It began as a gimmick.    

The Wave of Selenna

Now it’s canon.

Form and Style

Half‑face is simple in concept, intricate in execution. A face—typically female—rendered with playing-card symmetry, but far more detailed. One half revealed. The other veiled.

Not silhouetted.

Not erased.

Obscured.

The obscuring motifs vary:

• Natural: waves, leaves, feathers, flowing hair

• Abstract: curves, spirals, geometric shadows

• Man‑made: arches, columns, latticework

Color breaks the austerity—splashes of scarlet, gold, indigo—each chosen to disrupt and draw.

Resonance

Half‑face thrives on tension: seen vs unseen, revelation vs concealment. Nobles debate what the hidden half means. Is it lost memory? Hidden truth? The burden of legacy?

It’s become fashion.

It’s become philosophy.

Portraits, tapestries, and court jewelry adopt the motif. To commission a Half‑face is to declare your court enlightened. To wear one is to suggest you carry secrets worth veiling.

Among common folk:

“Half a face, half a truth.”

Among artists:

“The obscuring form is the true subject. The face is only the canvas.”

Testimony and Transformation

Half‑face works are canonized in shrines, galleries, and court halls. Some courts compete to host the most daring obscuring motif—waves that crash across the face, arches that split it in stone.

A few radical artists invert the tradition: obscuring the “revealed” half, leaving only the veil visible.

The movement is still evolving. Its origin is debated. Its meaning is contested. And that’s part of the appeal.

Selenna Reimagined

Origin Testimony

The truth? The originator—whose name may or may not be remembered in canon—wasn’t chasing mystery. He was chasing market.

He wanted something bold. Recognizable. Saleable.

Half‑face was conceived as a gimmick with flair. Not a grand philosophy.

But nobles seized on it. Artists claimed it. Meaning was layered, twisted, reframed. What began as a practical innovation became a movement of mystery—divorced from its humble intent.

Final Thoughts

Half‑face is both commerce and canon. Born of necessity. Elevated by fashion. The truth of its origin is obscured—just like the faces themselves.

In Aranor, that irony is part of the testimony.

Art that began as survival now thrives as philosophy.

Aronori Lore

 I've hinted at my world of Aranor before. I've done more than hint. Now, at last, I'm going to begin an earnest attempt to share it. I'll be making encyclopedic entries of lore drops, and occasional posts touching on integration with Mythras. I know what you're thinking. I've teased stuff before and didn't deliver. Only time will tell, but I'm sincerely hoping it will be different. My past modus operandi has been to have an overarching idea and piecemeal it out to establish a publishing cadence. This time I'm going to release it all as soon as it's ready. It may be more erratic, but hopefully it will be more material.

Without further ado, I give you Half-face

Why I Keep Returning to Qâl

 I’ve been dreaming about Qâl for a long time. It started as a setting idea—a moon orbiting the planet of my main campaign world, Aranor—but it’s become something much deeper. I didn’t realize it at first, but Qâl started reflecting things I couldn’t quite name. Fracture. Memory. Inheritance. The weight of stories we’re told, and the ones we tell ourselves to survive.

Qâl is a broken moon. Something struck it—an alien vessel—and the impact didn’t just shatter the land. It shattered truth. The people who live there don’t know what really happened. They were told to worship the God-Orb, the planet Aranor, which they orbit. They were told it’s divine, by aliens who set themselves up as priests. In time, even the priests forgot the truth and began believing the lie—believing they channel holy power.

But it’s all built on a lie. The God-Orb is just a planet. The power they feel is broadcast energy from a grid the aliens left behind. The grid doesn’t choose. It isn’t divine power or answered prayers. It just rains down, changing everything it touches.

And yet… life goes on. People build rituals. They form castes. They remember what they can, and forget what they must. Some Animists walk the literal edges of the world—the Scar left by the Great Breaking—trying to nurture the last peaceful memories Qâl still holds. Others want to burn it all down.

I think I understand that impulse more than I used to.

This world—this moon—isn’t just a setting anymore. It’s a mirror. And lately, I’ve been orbiting it from a place of my own fracture. Divorce. Displacement. The slow realization that some of the truths I built my life on weren’t truths at all.

But Qâl reminds me that even in a broken world, there are vestiges. Small places where peace still lingers. Moss that grows in defiance. A flame that never goes out.

That’s why I keep returning to Qâl. Not to escape, but to remember. To rebuild. To mythologize the things I can’t yet say out loud.

If you’re reading this, maybe you’re orbiting something too. Maybe you’re carrying a fracture of your own.

If so, welcome. There’s room for you here.

Compatible with Mythras, published by The Design Mechanism. This product is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Design Mechanism.

Ground Zero

 This is where it begins, my "journey" with One D&D. I don't care for that name, so I will be using D&D 2024, or when the context is understood, simply 2024.

Briefly stated, while I will forever adore the LBBs, I never played with only the first three. When my gaming career started, we already had the first three supplements, as well as Strategic Review and maybe a few issues of the Dragon. I grew up with class abilities and variable weapon damage (although I still love the elegance of all weapons doing d6). My point is, class abilities are baked into my gaming history. That's why games like GURPS or Runequest, while I love how they read, will never move me like D&D does.

Enough of that. I'm posting about 2024. But first, something about how we got to 2024, specifically, 2014. Read my previous post for context. I had developed the idea in my head that 5E had much more in common with the rules-as-law approach of 3.x, and I wasn't interested. I developed this impression mainly to retcon my agitation with Hasbro. My initial feelings on 5E were very positive when I got it. Then, recently, I started learning that I was laboring under a false assumption. So, I bought the 2024 core books.

So far, I am liking what I see. I still have a lot of reading to do, but my initial impression is that it's sort of moving the LBBs forward. It almost feels like they started with the spirit of the game in 1975-76, and added the best-of-the-best changes from then until now. I know that sounds weird, but I know what I mean. It just feels more open, more free, than 3.x or 4E. Don't get me wrong, those editions have a lot that I like, too, just not enough to achieve long-term attention from me.

Anyway, this is just a rough and dirty first thought. Almost like a place holder that will hopefully lead to something more regular. If anyone is still with me after my five year hiatus, I'd love to know. If it's not too much to ask, please drop a comment and say hi.

I'm Here to Chew Bubblegum and Kick Ass

 . . . and I'm all out of bubblegum

Hello, again. How long has it been, my friends? You may be wondering, what motivated me to write again. Self-reflection. I've always has a knack for self awareness and being dialed in to my own bullshit. That didn't really stop me from indulging in it, but it did provide grist for self loathing. Self, self, self.

Anyway, I won't bore you with the minutia, but I have discovered the joys of AI assistance the last few months. One of the things I've been using it for is game design. It's been a tremendous collaboration. It's prompted me to resurrect many old ideas that had grown cumbersome over the decades due to so many disparate notes scrawled on too many pieces of paper, impossible to collate, cross-reference, or index. In other words, unusable. AI can do all that. I just have to upload all the ideas, thoughts, and random musings, and AI can focus it all into something I can actually work on.

In the gathering of these notes, I walked these dusty halls, seeking things I had written for my world of Aranor, this being the only remaining place where some of it was stored. In so doing, I reread some of my posts on 5E, and thus we approach the crux of this post.

2014

I won't bore you with self-serving cross links. I was very excited (to say the least) by the release of 5E. Sadly, my enthusiasm for new rules, in any game, rarely survives reality. What I mean is, I rarely actually play anything new. I rarely play anything at all, in fact, but if I do, I usually opt for something familiar. I believe that stems from social anxiety, but this is not the time to open that can of worms.

Regardless, I was very pleased with 5E, as a rules set. Until. This is where some of you will possibly be tempted to write me off. If so, no hard feelings. I have never been political here. I'm fairly conservative, somewhere between Libertarian and Republican. Socially, I am personally conservative, but I don't really care how anyone else lives their life. Like a lot of people, I only ask to not be subjected to someone else's lifestyle. You do you, and I'll do me. When I saw the blurb in 5E about the game being open to all sexual and gender identities, it flew all over me. I've been gaming since 1976. When I started, the LBBs was all there was. Never in all that long history of gaming had I ever encountered anything prohibiting or limiting a player from playing a character that was gay or identified differently in any way. For that matter, I had gamed with many people whose character was of the opposite sex or a different race (as in societally, black, white, Asian, etc), and there were never any problems. I failed to see the need to have it spelled out so explicitly. It struck me as proselytizing, at best, or brow beating, at worst. In a reactionary move, I decided I didn't want to have a game that preached to me from what its writers deemed to be the moral high ground. So, I got rid of my 5E stuff.

The next few years (up until recently) my attention stayed on clones, mostly, for a D&D fix. I even have a couple of 5E clones. In the meantime, I started a new job, and one of my co-workers is a 5E guy. It's all he's played. Listening to him made me start thinking that maybe I had cheated myself. I wasn't convinced, though. I had really swallowed all the bad press about 5E, all the negatives that internet folk fixated on. His stories of his sessions were starting to make me wonder. I had started considering re-acquiring the core books, at least.

Then, the buzz about One D&D started. I was still heavily dialed into an internet crowd that was extremely anti-Hasbro and WotC, and that ire stained anything they produced. They would pick apart the smallest details, in a vacuum, and then make broad assertions. Thus it was that I wrote off One D&D as a non-starter for me.

At some point, about 3 or 4 weeks ago, there was a shift in my thinking. I can't explain it, or even pinpoint a catalyst. Something in my mind switched, and I realized that I dont give a single skinny shit about the politics of Hasbro or WotC. I never even knew the politics of TSR. All I care about is a set of rules to act as an effective lens to view my world through. Most of the criticism I see about the new edition is mainly the "little guy" having beef with the "evil corporation", which really doesn't factor. Sheepishly, I admitted to myself that I had attributed far too much influence to spurious criticism. So, I bought the One D&D core books. 

I'm still in the early stages of familiarity, but so far, so good. I want to put my thoughts on One D&D into a clean post devoted to only those thoughts, though. This is more of a journal entry, giving insight to myself and anyone else willing to read it, about the thoughts and attitudes that move me.

If you made it this far, thank you. I'm hoping to get back to posting here, but only time will tell. I have a lot of catching up to do.

A Game of What-if Pt 1

 It has always been on my mind, the familial bond between Chainmail and D&D. I have always been entranced by the OSR titles that explore that DNA. I have pondered my own take on how to meld the two, even to the point of devising my own half-baked attempt. The thing, though, is this: I have always looked at it from a standing start. In other words, I have approached the exercise as if D&D hadn't been written. Alternatively, I have approached it with more of a piece-meal attitude, intent on replacing certain aspects, such as the alternative combat system with that from Chainmail. Yet, in either event, in my mind, my starting point was that whatever I had was the origin point. So, in my design space, my conceit was that I was trying to merge the Chainmail combat system with D&D, and pretend that was the way it was when I opened the box.

I know that sounds weird. It would be difficult for me to express the influence that nostalgia has on my gaming. It informs so much of my gaming, from ordering old Avalon Hill games off Ebay, to how I approach developing ideas for D&D. I want to put my mind in 1976 and approach D&D from there. It may sound delusional at best, or a misguided effort doomed from inception at worst. But it's my time spent with my hobby, and I pursue it for relaxation. If spending some time in 1976 will relax me and bring me some edification, then it was well-spent.

This is intended to be a design log of yet another effort to reconcile Chainmail with D&D. This time is different though. This may be nuanced to the point of nothing more than semantics. It may be putting too fine of a point on it, but this time really is different. The perspective I am approaching from is this:

I've played Chainmail, even fighting battles with the fantasy supplement. Now, it's sometime in 1975 and I've gotten my hands on D&D. I love the ideas and potential I see in it, but I'm not thrilled with how it abandons so much of Chainmail. So, this design log will be all about how I take the finished product of D&D and retool aspects so that they draw more from Chainmail, rather than all-new systems created whole cloth.

In future posts I intend to explore the following:

Classes:

• Bring Fighting-Men more inline with the Heroes and Superheroes of Chainmail
• Give Magic Users more of the "fire at will" aspect of Chainmail wizards, while keeping Vancian casting, because it is flavorful and keeps magic users from dominating the campaign
• Examine Clerics more as members of militant religious orders, rather than priests.
• Thieves will be based more on the GPNL thief, which went on to inspire the Greyhawk thief.

Combat

• Reconcile the three combat subsystems into a seamless, integrated whole

Monsters

• Crack the "code" of the Fantasy Combat Table in order to plug "new" creatures  from M&T into the system.

Treasure

• Reconcile magic swords and armor with the D&D classes and Chainmail combat system.

It is my desire to divorce specific experience I have from my thinking on this project. In other words, there won't be any ascending AC, stat-based saves, or even single save numbers. I will only consider including things that were available as of my (admittedly arbitrary) start date. That will probably include Greyhaw, Strategic Review, and possibly Blackmoor and maybe early issues of the Dragon. That doesn't mean that anything from them will be included, I'll just consider them available.

So, there it is, the foundational philosophy of this project. As always, comments, advise, thoughts, and encouragement are always welcomed.