I hereby promise to not publish any more "generic" fantasy crap on this blog.

In the comments to my last post (a continuation of my ongoing Orcish Lowlands series), Timeshadows called me out for throwing some gargoyles into the petrified forest without providing a real sense of what they were doing there, why they were doing it and how they might get  'er done.  I responded with some equivocating bullshit excuse about how I have been removing some of the stranger elements from my homebrew setting to keep the Orcish Lowlands more usable, to make it "plug and play" to steal the parlance of USB connectivity.

The gargoyles, in all actuality, are not gargoyles.  They are first generation offspring of tree-devils and petrified trees.  I suppose you might call them Stone Devils, or Stone Tree Devils.  As such, they are quite powerful and have access to a kind of magic that is all but forgotten in the day and age described in my Orcish Lowland posts.    That is really neither here nor there, but the point is this: after allowing Timeshadows' comment to marinate today while I tramped around a natural foods conference (I emerged with giant bags of loot and a new respect for dungeon crawlers that haul out bags of gold; my bags of food and supplement samples, teeshirts and product literature weighed a TON and were quite unwieldy), I have decided that she was completely right.

"While I can understand your concern about the setting v. generic issue, I'd much rather see your setting than another generic product.
--My opinion on this has been stated all over Bloglandia.

Regarding the specifics you have shared, that is exactly the sort of stuff I'd rather read than something I could generate on my own with a hexploration table and dice."

Thanks, Timeshadows, that is exactly what I needed to hear.

It is really easy to strip away strange weird details from a setting to leave something bland and vanilla to insert into boring Forgotten Realms campaign X (not to pick on the realms, but... I'm picking on the realms).  Perhaps I take for granted my ability to come up with the strange, the outlandish details, the downright bizarre.   I am reminded regularly when reading other people's posts that not everyone can just come up with crazy shit off the top of their heads.

So I hereby pledge to not censor myself, to not remove the strange details, to not present a generic fantasy product.  That means you are going to read some BATSHIT CRAZY stuff.  Brace yourself.