Friday, May 29, 2015

Eberron's Changelings for Heroes & Other Worlds

It's been a while since I posted anything HOW-related, so I figured I'd do a little work on that. As an aside, despite having abandoned my previous plan for posts, I am going to type up part 2 of The Tome of Terrors and Treasures review before next Friday. Anyway, onto business.
Changelings are Humanoids with Doppelganger ancestors somewhere in their family tree. For further info I suggest checking out Races of Eberron. It provides more info on Eberron's unique races (Changelings, Shifters, Warforged) and new cultures for classic races like Elves, Orcs, and Halflings.

Game rules:

Changeling NPC Statistics
#: 1d3
ST: 8-10
DX: 10 (8)
IQ: 8
EN: 0
MV: 5
Behavior: Unpredictable (10)
Habitat: Any Urban or Wilderness
AR: -2 (Leather)
DM: 1D6 (Dagger)
SP: multiple
TR:2

Changelings as characters
- +2 IQ on tests to resist sleep and charm effects
- +2 IQ on Detect/Tell Lies tests.
- Minor Change Shape: Changelings can subtly alter their physical appearance. This ability functions as the Disguise Self spell (Magi Carta 29) but it only affects the Changeling's body and voice, not clothing or equipment. This change is also not an illusion but real physical change. It costs 2 EN and takes a full 5-second turn for a Changeling to change form. Once complete, the Changeling remain in her new form until she changes again or is killed. True Seeing (Magi Carta 135) reveals a Changeling's natural form. When using her ability to create a disguise, a Changeling gets +6 IQ on Act/Disguise tests.

Hopefully my conversion skills haven't atrophied too badly :v

Monday, May 25, 2015

Making RPGs as a hobby: Is it just a waste of time?

I've always seen a question given to those who want to write a new commercial role-playing game: "What does your game offer that [system name with similar concept] doesn't?" It's a pertinent question that anyone hoping to sell RPGs should try to answer. But what if you don't plan to sell anything? What if you just want to make something?

The idea of targeting a "niche" is also complicated by modern filesharing: Why would a person look at your homebrew Lovecraftian horror system when he can just get the latest Call of Cthulhu PDF with a little googling?

Are things like darkshire's list of free RPGs or 1000 monkeys, 1000 typewriters relevant anymore? Before sites like those offered free alternatives to the costlier products from big publishers but now filesharing (or piracy, take your pick) is so easy and reliable.

I guess I'm motivated by egotism: I want to write new games but I also want people to at least read them. Putting effort into something no one or almost no one will read seems like a waste. But then again, I've started work on so many systems over the years only to end up abandoning them, so does it really matter if anyone reads my rules?

Friday, May 22, 2015

City of Lies

I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging now that the semester's over, so sorry if my last few and next few posts are a bit rambling. I was thinking yesterday about redundancy of races/monsters in fantasy, a trend I have strong opinions about and will discuss at length in a future blog post. But I also thought about how redundancy could be used positively in terms of adventure design. In a nutshell, the idea is Rakshasas, Werewolves, and Doppelgangers involved in a shadow war in a modest colonial port. Although the ideas presented are based on D&D, the concept should be easily adaptable to any fantasy game.





There a few assumptions that I used to make this scenario:

  • The world is very near to an industrial revolution but not quite there yet
  • There is an expansionist Britain-like empire that controls parts of both a USA-like and China-like countries
  • This empire has been around for centuries in some form or another
  • Factories exist
  • Firearms are uncommon but everyone knows someone who has a gun
  • Rakshasas, Doppelgangers, Werewolves, and Succubi exist in the campaign world


As for the city itself:

  • It's a colonial port founded about 150-200 years ago in not-America. 
  • All the political power is concentrated in the hands of nobility and their subordinates.
  • It refines raw goods from the local territories into ready-to-use materials for factories back in not-Britain
  • There is a small community of Dwarves here who maintain the machinery of the factories.
  • There is also a community of not-Chinese smaller than the Dwarven community. They leave in a fantasy equivalent of Chinatown
  • The not-Chinese get the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the factories, port, sewers and outside the city.

Hopefully that seems coherent so far.

Twist #1: The nobles of this area are predominantly Werewolves and have been ever since the city's founding. They control the government and the police. They are careful to control their predatory urges via staged "hunts" outside the city at their country estates. Typical prey includes thieves, criminals of all stripes, those with insurmountable debts, and the occasional stray not-Chinese worker. These victims are rounded up by extremely loyal and secretive police squad who often have at least one Werewolf in the group. The community strongly discourages killing anyone inside the city proper. Offenders quickly find themselves getting shafted in terms of agreements and overruled by superiors. Those who persist in these offenses may find themselves tortured or becoming the prey of a very special hunt.  There are approximately 80-120 Werewolves in the city. The werewolves are blissfully unaware of the other shapeshifters in the city.

Twist #2: Fifteen years ago, an elderly martial arts master arrived in not-Chinatown and opened a small school. Preaching edification through mental and physical strength, he quickly became an influential member within the immigrant community. The next year, a wealthy merchant and his wife arrived. They graciously used their funds to improve the local housing and pay for medical treatment that many working families needed. The year after that, a teacher and a lawyer arrived and have been educating the populace. At the same time, more and more violent gangs have sprung up since the master arrived fifteen years ago. The local police don't interfere with not-Chinatown unless violence spills out into the general city but they've been watching anxiously as the gangs become larger and more heavily armed. The five persons mentioned earlier, the master, merchant, wife, teacher, and lawyer, are all Rakshasas and are organizing the gangs. They plan on overthrowing the local government and establishing a pirate enclave here. The Rakshasas know that some of the police and government are Werewolves but vastly underestimate their number. They have a much more accurate estimation of the Doppelgangers' numbers and are currently in a truce with them.

Twist #3: More recently, about five years ago, a number of very vocal dissidents advocating for better working conditions, better wages, shorter hours, and more autonomy have been causing disruptions. There are two types of dissident rhetoric: One is political and says that current working conditions are a violation of legal rights and a thinly-disguised tyranny; the other is religious and preaches in the name of gods of freedom that current working conditions are akin to slavery. Despite frequent police crackdowns, the ringleaders always seem to escape and reappear weeks later to incite more unrest. The truth is that ringleaders are Doppelgangers. The political and religious parties are two allied but independent groups working to sow chaos and an armed revolt in the city. They hope to either draw troops away from the much richer and more strategic ports in the north or to draw garrisons from non-Britain itself and launch a bloody uprising. A stumbling block in the political movement's plan is that they are don't know that Werewolves are in town and they mistakenly believe that the Rakshasas are fellow Doppelgangers. But the religious movement knows better . . .

Twist #4: Three years ago, members of the Doppelgangers' religious movement discovered a secret complex deep in the sewers beneath the site that formerly hosted a stately manor. Within these chambers they found a sizable collection of magical texts and trinkets. But the most important find was that of a summoned Succubus. Summoned fifty years ago by a local wizard to act as lover/mentor, she was bound to a small phylactery warded against the touch of demons. One day, the wizard never returned and so she was unable to leave due to the magics that bound her to the phylactery. Over the many decades she studied, practiced, and improved on all the magic within the complex. Those Doppelgangers freed her and have established a secret cult around her. She has taught them many dark and ancient magics and given them very detailed information on the city. The religious movement/cult knows of numerous secret hideaways in sewers and mausoleums; the identities of most werewolves that were alive fifty years ago and by extension many of those still alive; and thanks the Succubus' divination they know that the mysterious master in not-Chinatown is definitely not a Doppelganger. Unlike the other groups, their motivation has taken on a mystical character. They want to incite the bloody war between the Rakshasa gangs, the Werewolf-controlled government and police, and the Doppelganger-led labor unions then harvest the spiritual energy that the dead and dying will radiate from the comfort of their underground catacombs.

Setting off the tinderbox: The Doppelganger cultists' plan to ignite the powderkeg is fairly straightforward. One of them will impersonate a known Werewolf's Human form then hire a prostitute or invite one of the impersonated Werewolf's friends to a very public place were the police and the public will witness the pair. The Doppelganger will then shapeshift into a hybrid Werewolf form, maul whomever was unfortunate to be its companion for the night, and escape into the sewers. The Werewolves and police will be busy trying to suppress the events and capture the presumed murderer. The Rakshasas will stir up the gangs to fight against monstrous oppressors who are truly monsters; the Doppelganger political movement will do the same. The religious movement will call for a divinely-sanctioned purge of the evil in the city's midst then retreat to the winding warrens below.

After that, even I don't know what happens.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Sword of the Stars lore snippets

I'm not a big fan of current story, setting, or models of Warhammer 40,000 but there's something about the older editions of it and especially Rogue Trader that really appeals to me. In fact, the idea of retro-cloning RT has been something that has been nibbling at the back of my mind for a while, although I don't feel qualified to really make any efforts in that regard. One thing that did seem more manageable to me was a retroclone of Space Crusade, the licensed Warhammer boardgame by Milton Bradley.


It's much more contained system that nevertheless has a lot of potential for expansion. The first thing that I actually did was try to create the fluff for this hypothetical Space Crusade simulacra. Here's what I wrote for Sword of the Stars (the clone's tentative title):

It has been over thirty thousand years since Humans left the embrace of Gaia. All across the galaxy, Humanity spreads, bringing order and civilization to savage worlds. But the the forces of Chaos and Entropy are ever lurking at the edges of the realms. So the Knightly Orders arose, to defend Order and Evolution, to fight for the honor of Sol and the children of Gaia. This is an age of sorcery and science, noble deaths and pyrrhic victories, forgotten heroes and immortal villains.
It's rather close to the standard 40k blurb but it emphasizes the fantastical elements a little more. The Knightly Orders and their Space Knights are equivalent to Space Marines. Here are some brief enemy descriptions:

THE CHAOS KNIGHTS
It is said that the seed of Chaos lurks in the heart of all Humans. Knights struggle with their base desires, overcoming their temptations with the help of the sacred codes. But just as all Humans, some Knights succumb to temptation. At their best, Chaos Knights are thieves, liars, and murderers; at their worst they are apostates against Sol and Gaia, fiends who have entered into compacts with vile spirits of Chaos and Entropy.
It should go without saying that Chaos Knights are just SOTS' version of Chaos Space Marines.
THE K'BOLTS
Said to have been born from the blood of the first Chaos Dragons, the K'bolts are one of the numerous Entropic races to be encountered. They are small and weak but attack in endless numbers. The worlds they claim quickly overflow with corpses and offal as they outstrip their environment's resources.
Space Kobolds although I seem to have included some Ork/Tyranid in there as well.
THE PSYCLOPSES
Among the most mysterious and powerful mortals to serve Chaos, these single-eyed giants possess not only physical might but mental sorcery. A single Psyclops is a terrible danger even to a Fellowship of Knights
Doesn't really say much about the Psyclopses themselves other than "they're scary". Hurm.

Here's a statline for a Paladin (Space Knight):
Paladin
MELEE: Lectro Weapon - 3 dice
RANGED: Laser pistol - 2 dice, range 6
HEALTH 5
DEFENCE 9
SPEED 6
Note the use of "Defence". Range and Speed are in 1-inch squares. I'm a little unsure how exactly I changed Space Crusade's combat system but I believe that the dice in question are d6s and that the combined roll of those d6s must exceed the target's Defence to deal damage. So, supposing two Paladins are facing off and one swings his Lectro Weapon he must score a 9 or higher from his roll of 3d6 to damage his opponent.

I think this one speaks for itself:
Hypothetical Model list
KNIGHTS: 3 Paladins; 7 Knights with rifles; 4 Knights with swords and pistols; 4 Knights with heavy weapons
CHAOS KNIGHTS: 1 Butcher; 6 Knaves with rifles; 6 Knaves  with swords and pistols; 3 Knaves with heavy weapons
K'BOLTS: 3 Champions; 30 Fodder
PSYCLOPS: 1 Visionary; 2 Seers; 4 Brutes
Of course, my talent for sculpting is even worse than my talent for drafting game rules, so don't expect Sword of the Stars to be showing for sale. 

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Big random list of ideas and things that I think are cool

Sometimes while browsing the internet or flipping through a fantasy book I see something and I think "that's neat, can I work that into a setting?" The following is a list I made of random stuff that struck a cord with me. I want to be perfectly clear that the vast majority of this stuff was all someone else's ideas. A few items have comments in blue.

-Metallic dragons are fully bipedal, Chromatics are partial bipeds/quadrapeds
 

-Cave creatures: can climb, have claws, blinded by light
 

-Bound outsiders, produce different effects based on type
 

-Crystalline creatures created by a plague; Elemental evils involved
 

-Flesh plants: plant creatures made of meat
 

-Miniature (>6 inch) fiends and giants?
 

-Weredisplacer beasts, Wereorcs, Weretreants
 

-Nocturnal template: light sensitivity, low-light vision
 

-Primitive template
 

-Prismatic/rainbow creatures; prismatic castes
 

-Quadrepedal mutants: general form of horse/lion, elongated torso/neck, paws instead of hands
 

-Quadrapedal Succubus turns into beautiful horse or livestock to lure mortals near
 

-Elder beasts: Animals almost as old as the world itself; sapient and capable of speech
 

-Demi-"Gorgon"
 

-Enchanted creatures exposed to too much magic/fey
 

-Efreeti...forbears of Tieflings?
 

-Evolved magical hiveminds
 

-Endless twilight swamp plane home to hags and other muck-fiends
 

-Madness Giant: crawling, many-faced, chaos servant

-White Beast: infused with sacred energy, guardians of nature vs undead
 

-The dragon concept always sat right with me, because I always pictured Malal as this daemonic ouroboros-like monstrosity mixed with a hydra: Constantly eating his own tail to swallow himself whole in an endless, suicidal loop, but every now and then spawning new heads to consume himself in even more twisted ways while also ensnaring everything around him in a chaotic maelstrom of pure, chilling hate. One anonymous poster's version of Malal, a now-retconned Chaos god from Warhammer.
 

- (OC) Intelligent, giant golden crocodile demands tobacco or meat for passage through his swamp Inspired by part of the Bangles' Walk like an Egyptian (gold crocodiles oheoh/they snap their teeth on your cigarette)
 

- a "young" world, one that was created in living memory. In the beginning there were no steel weapons, no written language, and only a few generations’ worth of history.
 

-"Good people are like extremely rare gems. They are something to be highly valued."
 

-Chimeric Chimera: an eight-headed creature with five dragon heads, two goat heads, and a lion head (kind of like a mutated aspect of Tiamat). The lion head is in charge, though the other heads offer opinions and try to assert authority from time to time. The dragon heads span the evil chromatic types for interest; if you're a purist you can give it four green heads and a red head.
 

-The golems and other animated guardians created by the ancients simply remained at their posts, patient and silent, awaiting new orders that would never come. Eventually, the elements wore down even these ancient constructs, and their bodies fell apart from disuse.Yet so strong was the binding magic that anchored the animating elemental spirits to these ancient golems that when the bodies died, their elemental "souls" died as well -- yet they did not return to the elemental planes once their bodies wasted away. Still bound to a body that no longer existed, these disembodied elemental spirits transformed into strange undead known today as golem remnants.
 

-Poachers and hunters are naturally drawn to certain creatures whose body parts are valued as trophies. Unfortunately, beasts that are slain by hunters sometimes rise as undead monsters cursed to forever stalk those who inflicted such a distasteful end upon them.
 

-What at first appeared to be a fast-moving cloud of volcanic ash resolves into something far more terrible. Thousands of burning bodies and blackened skeletons tumble and roil in the cloud. The unliving bodies emit a constant thunderous scream, as if a volcano had learned to wail in agony from the fire in its core.The necroclasm is one of the largest forms of undead; fortunately, they are limited in range to the volcano that spawned them. One of WOTC's old Far Corners of The World monsters.
 

-A large, brass chest, large enough to be a coffin. It contains the corpse of whoever opens it. This effect is similar to the clone spell except that the clone comes out dead. The corpse has all the same scars and body markings as its living counterpart, but it does not have any clothes or possessions. The chest can be used to produce an infinite number of corpses.
 

-Reptilian variants of races: were they created by interbreeding, gods, or dragons?
 

-Insectoid variants of races: see above
 

-Winged variants of race: ditto
 

-arctic apes worship evil ice deity
 

-vampires based on the egyptian god Shezmu; Lion-related rather than bat-related
 

-Fetid Heath of the Death Giant Overlord A pastiche of the classic D&D Giant modules I was wanting to make for All Flesh Must Be Eaten
 

-"I wish that I was the sultan...that I was always the sultan!" Supposedly the original version of Jafar's wish from Disney's Aladdin. I like the paradoxical situations it creates, such as a sultan existing before the nation or even the city did.

-Each has a unique name and when this name is spoken, the creature is released from the ___ and immediately makes its way to to the speaker of the name.  It's sole purpose is to kill the speaker and return to the ___.  Part of a monster description from an old AD&D netbook. The monster didn't impress me but this part did.

-Blinded Medusae/Gorgons are immortal, hunt by scent.
 

-Giant that bleeds snakes Pretty sure this one came to me in a dream. I don't know how it works.
 

-1945-1960. The sudden rush of magic into the world means that a whole new arms race is just beginning, and the fear of Red Witches is everywhere.
 

-Ant-Mimicking Spiders are weird. They look like ants. But they're spiders. And they go into ant colonies all incognito, and eat ants when no one is looking. So do that, but have them be Human-Mimicking Spiders. Don't ask me how that works. It just does.
 

-You could do GIANT ANTS that Anteater-men hunt for their meat and carapaces
 

-Demigods who embody ideals: not immortal
 

-BatMonkey Vampires devolved from bigger vamps
 

-Gang war between two gangs of intelligent weapons.
 

-Planetoid on fire: inhabited by salamanders, mephits, etc
 

-Cult/sect seeking to combine specific gods into a single entity
 

-Essential words for fantasy languages: to, from, above, below, beside, son (of), daughter (of), man, woman, hill, mountain, tree, bear, river, forest, plain, desert, meadow, canyon, great, big, small, dry, wet, [colors], N/E/S/W, horse, city, village, dangerous, fire, wind, water, rain, cloud, holy, cursed, peace(ful), famous From a very good article in Dragon magazine.
 

-Am-heh, "eater of eternity" "devourer of millions", dog-headed demon-god of the Egyptian underworld
 

-Hezur, deified baboon/reincarnated ancestor. Egyptian.
 

-Erlik, bear/pig/man god of evil, death, and the underworld. Turkic/Mongolian.
 

-Whiro, eats the souls of uncremated dead, grows stronger, threatens to break out of the underworld. Maori.
 

-Ancient frog deity served by frog-men and frog-things
 

-Witches can't affect clerics or genies (djinn/efreet) Just an interesting tidbit from Dragon magazine
 

-"Gnolls"-Troll/Gnome hybrids Chainmail-era Gnolls seem more interesting than the hyena-men we got later.
 

-Green and red monkeys: reds are lust monsters European bestiaries are pretty whacky.
 

-"Troglodytes": maned apes
 

-Multiple Camelots (or other archetypical/mythic realms...Atlantis?) reflecting a different facet of alignment/mortal emotions. Specifically cribbed from an old AD&D website but this idea has shown up in other places too. The Atlantis spin is an original idea donut steal
 

-Elementalist cults that worship evil elementals
 

-Black gods (Olmec) vs White gods (Aryan): Obsidian Giants vs Pearl Giants? From a pseudoscience website run by a Russian geologist. I almost immediately discarded his original racial schema in favor of shiny space gods inspired by Jack Kirby's comics and DC's Millennium Giants.
 

-Petrification as fantasy equivalent of cryogenic sleep
 

-Shamen wear skins of monsters to prove their mastery over them
 

-Aaatxe: the evil storm-bull
 

-Abhiyoga: Spirits of rain and darkness
 

-fire+earth+water=clay; metal+water=rust Just fleshing out elementals a little more here. I made a much longer list as well.
 

-Bardha: white-skinned, underground-dwelling elves who demand cakes and sugar
 

-Bes: Dwarves + lion ears/tails. Evil
 

-land of the dead is literally in the west; land of the gods is literally in the east
 

-Army of severed undead hands
 

-. . .an expanse of earth that has been scoured of all fertile soil . . . No ground can be seen, however, because obelisks and pyramids occupy every inche of the surface. Beneath and inside these structures lies a series of catacombs and passageways that are likewise crowded with statues and sarcophagi.
Pretty sure this is from Deities & Demigods or another 3.5 splat. It's Set's realm.
 


-Greek gods were limited. They couldn't go back on their word. They couldn't change another god's work.
 

-Naga with an Illithid head
 

-Lightless seas and the evils that dwell therein
 

-Drug-using witch cult with super shrooms
 

-Snakes/slugs with prehensile forked tongues but no arms
 

-One of the gods is actually a goddess
 

-Mystic pyramids that keep sand at bay
 

-Conical pyramids that are the tombs of a legendary alchemist
 

-Egyptian hobgoblins
 

-Lawful god vs chaos god This and the next five things are original content. Yay me!
 

-Chaos god is associated with cats, night, darkness
 

-Lawful god is associated with frogs/salamanders/amphibious reptiles, day, sun
 

-Dragons are creations of the Lawful god and are amphibious
 

-Most cultures worship the Lawful god
 

-Most cultures hate cats but there are superstitions that prohibit them from directly killing/harming cats

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Elves of Tarfel

Yay a new post after a million years! This semester is really hard .___.

Spinning off of my post about a new campaign setting I'm cobbling together, here's an extended look at the Elves of Taurion Effel/Tarfel.

The Ancients of The Elderwood

The Elderwood is a vast, ancient forest dominating the north-central area of the Civilized Countries. Within it are strange beings that combine Elvish and Plant-like features. The "Elder Elves" lack any ability to speak. The most Elvish among them have growths resembling moss or vine-like plants and have brown blood; they are standoffish but will not attack unless threatened. As one journeys farther into the Elderwood, the elves become more plantlike. The deepest specimens retrieved have bark-like skin and green blood with the consistency of slime or syrup. Elder Elves are curious in that they only seem to eat raw meat; a few specimens were taught to eat cooked meat but they only did so reluctantly. The civilized Elves of the Day, Night, and Gloom cultures are completely disinterested them, viewing the Elders as results of parallel evolution or degenerate breeding (or both according to some works by Elvish scholars). Aside from Human researchers, the only other group interested in them are the Serpentine, who capture them for experimentation or execute them outright.

Day Elves and Night Elves

Although the Serpentine describe the Elvish conquest in the same manner as an outbreak of rodents, with disorganized butchery and senseless violence, the Elves insist that their conquest was organized and commanded by a cosmic deity. After the overthrow of the Serpentine, the Elves prosper for thousands of years until the Great Schism. Wicked Elves lusting for power and wealth forsook their patron deity and turned to an opposing power, shattering their empire with civil war and apostasy.
Those are the facts that both sides agree on. Additional details are highly contentious. One group, the Day Elves, insist that their original deity was Ialtes (worshiped by Humans as "Yalt"), the lion-headed sun god. The apostates who caused the Great Schism turned from him to the worship of Sethon (known as "Thoom" to Humans), the snake-like deity of night, shadows, and lies. The other contingent calls themselves the Night Elves and claim that it was Sethon who was their patron in prehistoric times and that cult of Ialtes is the real apostasy. Despite their differences in history and religion, their dress, societies, rituals, and social mores remain strikingly similar. Nevertheless, they consider being called by the names of their hated brethren to be the greatest insult which combined with their lack of differentiation in regards to speech and clothing insofar as non-Elves can perceive them, have resulted in the deaths of many Humans and Dwarves who have misidentified them.

 

 The Deep Elves

 After the Great Schism, the largest Day Elf bloc was that ruled by Abal, son of a regional governor named Hased. Abal was the first king of what is now identified as the Hasedite Kingdom. Abal had eight successors over the next five centuries. The last of these was Tabel. During his reign a vast conspiracy among political and mercantile elites that had been brewing since the reign of his father, King Awen, began an open revolt. The elites manage to rally peasants to themselves with promises of more freedom, limited land redistribution, and the gift of a single non-Elf slave to every household.
In desperation, Tabel turned to the Deep Dwarves for aid. The Deep Dwarves had crushed an expansionist campaign by King Lutel two centuries earlier in the hinterlands of the Fang Mountains and following their victory entered into a non-aggresion pact with the Hasedite Kingdom. Tabel used Deep Dwarf mercenaries to supplement his troops and crushed the rebellious elites. Following this, the vanquished were paraded through the capital and both the regular Elvish army and the Dwarven mercenaries participated in the King's three-day victory feast. According to the legend, on the last day of the feast the high priest of Ialtes, an aged Elf named Baru, chided Tabel saying that he had enough rabble-rousing and that tomorrow at noonday the captives should be ritually executed for defying the sovereign chosen by the sun deity. Tabel is said to have laughed and casually informed the priest that the captives were leaving that night with the Dwarves; Tabel had nowhere near enough treasure to hire such a huge contingent of mercenaries so he agreed to turn over all captives as slaves to the Dwarves. The high priest Baru stood up and invoked the gravest curse possibly against the King, that his heirs should all die and he and all those related to him by blood be rendered infertile, for his offense of denying blood sacrifice to Ialtes and for selling his kin into the hands of lesser beings.. That very night, the Dwarves marched back to their lands in the Fang Mountains with their new slaves in tow. This episode is referred to as the "Sin of King Tabel" in Elvish histories. The Elvishy slaves eventually won emancipation and developed a new culture based on a synthesis of Dwarven
and Elvish attitudes. These former slaves are now called Gloom Elves. They no longer worship Ialtes but have instead adopted traditional Dwaven deities and ancestor worship. They also maintain a great deal of enmity toward both the Night Elves (their traditional enemies as Day Elf descendants) and the Day Elves (who are viewed as traitors and tyrants).