SETTING BOUNDARIES: The Ruin That Befell Dolmenwood
How to Disneyfy Wormskin for Fun and Profit
Updated 30/08/2024 with comment on “Dolmenwood Uncensored”.
Updated 24/08/2024 with Gavin’s response and further evidence showing external influence on changes.
The Beginning
I’ve been writing up my thoughts on Dolmenwood. The Kickstarter PDF is finalised except for minor changes, so I decided I’d get some notes in place ready for a review after it’s actually released.
Most of my criticism revolved around one topic:
Where the fuck has Wormskin gone?
Wormskin was the e-zine from which Dolmenwood originated which was written by Gavin Norman and Greg Gorgonmilk. Due to the nature of the zine, the setting was very fill in the blanks, with a lot of the elements being presumptive rather than being explicitly laid out.
But it caught on, because Wormskin was brilliant.
The Dolmenwood in Wormskin was beautifully dark and fairytale, wondrous and cruel in equal measure. The setting was reflective rather than derivative and one of the few settings that I have seen that would actually support a dark fantasy campaign.
It was Brothers Grimm meets Lord Dunsany and William Morris thrown into a fantasy setting. Like putting lemon juice into milk, it had a lovely sour tang.
After Wormskin, there were a few years of a Dolmenwood Patreon, where the Wormskin hexes and setting material was intended to be expanded into a fully fledged book. It was always intended that after this, there was a plan for a Dolmenwood Kickstarter to get the books finalised, art commissioned and a print run done.
Shortly after the announcement of the Dolmenwood Kickstarter, the Wormskin zine was removed from sale (see “The End of Wormskin”). The removal post included this message:
The full campaign setting books include almost everything from Wormskin (in a revised and updated format) plus much, much more material besides, all logically structured and formatted for ease of reference and use at the table.
Then the Dolmenwood Kickstarter happened, getting nearly $1.4mil in pledges. This was, in all likelihood, too much money to fail. It also brought the usual crowd of moaners out of the woodworks. Changes had to be made to appease these people. Edges needed to be ground off, names had to be changed, fundamental setting elements were torn out to satisfy the complainers.
It had to be made more palatable, into a better product.
Thus they made Disneywood.
Terminology
For the sake of clarity and avoiding writing out Dolmenwood ten billion times:
WS: Anything from the zine Wormskin where the Dolmenwood setting was originally conceived. Written by Gavin Norman and Greg Gorgonmilk.
DWP: Anything from the Dolmenwood Patreon. Written by a lot of people, but principally Gavin Norman.
DWK: Anything from the Dolmenwood Kickstarter. Written by a lot of people, but principally Gavin Norman.
Comparisons will be indicated like so:
“WS Issue #4 ~ DWK 2024-02-05”
This means that the left hand side is Wormskin #4 and the right hand side is the Dolmenwood Kickstarter pdf from the 5th February 2024.
Examples
There are a few examples that I have, which are reasonably well known by the community. Some of these are absolutely egregious, some less so. They just illustrate the Disney changes to the Wormskin vibe.
#1: Minstrel to Bard
A simple and minor one to start off with. A late addition to the DWP was the “Minstrel” class. This was a bard-style class that used magic to enchant and charm monsters, as well as some thief skills to support themselves.
The class name “Minstrel” was used because it slotted in neatly with the evocative names of other classes like Knight, Hunter, Enchanter and Friar. It established the place and the use of it in the setting.
WS used minstrel and bard somewhat interchangeably. There is a Bardic Guild referenced in WS #6 that acts as a protectionism focused organisation to extort musicians of money.
Within the DWP, the name choice is down to the historical associations. Minstrel is close to the Dolmenwood high middle ages theme. Bard has, for me, a lot more cultural associations than fantastical. I think it’s heavily misused, mostly by colonialists who did everything possible to crush bardic culture.
The name minstrel was deemed offensive after the Kickstarter ended.
This is down to Americans complaining about it:
Bard instead of Minstrel
Gavin became aware of the cultural context in the US, where Minstrel means something very different to what comes to mind when thinking of the word in the UK. The US has a history of things called Minstrelsy/Minstrel Shows, where white actors would wear blackface and portray exaggerated racial stereotypes for the purposes of comedy (or what passed for it in the early 1800s). This history has aged extremely poorly, and is generally considered very racist today. To avoid this connotation and unfortunate history springing to mind Gavin changed the word to the already commonly used in fantasy TTRPG term Bard.
…
If you disagree with any of the above logic, good for you, but the change was made because Gavin felt it made the product better. If you disagree with that, feel free to not buy Dolmenwood and probably stop engaging in the channel about discussing it?
posted on the Necrotic Gnome Fan Community on 17/04/2024
There’s a fucking perverse irony in using a misused cultural term (bard) in order to avoid using a historically relevant term (minstrel) in order to avoid another instance of cultural misuse (American minstrel shows).
Especially since it makes bards (travelling story tellers, historians and genealogists) associated with pickpocketing and petty larceny.
Regardless, is this that big a deal? Let’s be honest, not really.
Is it a fucking farce? Absolutely it is.
The first thing that sticks out is that it says don’t buy Dolmenwood many months after the Kickstarter ended and before Dolmenwood is even released for sale.
The second thing is that “Gavin felt it made the product better”. Sure, I could see that it made it more saleable. It probably marginally reduced the amount of overall whining.
I doubt it made it actually any fucking better.
One of the things that made WS so good was that it didn’t really seem to care too much about being a product. It instead felt like a lived in setting.
The Dolmenwood of DWK feels much less like one.
#2: The Goatmen (or Goatfolk or Breggle or whatever they’re called this week)
A much more annoying, and inexplicable, series of changes have been done to the goat-men. Up above is the first page of the monster manual entries for each, which are just scraping the surface.
In WS, goatmen are a dark reflection of the aristocracy. They are intelligent, well-dressed and usually erudite, with skill in both arms and magic. They are also evil, rapacious and casually cruel. They breed human slave-pets that they keep magically charmed and permanently dulled by herbs. They don’t even think humans have souls and are therefore not worthy of any respect.
Parts of this were kept in the DWP where the goatmen are changed to be goatfolk. The outright evil and casual cruelty was dropped, along with the human slave-pets. They are still cruel, but no longer inhumanly so.
Next, the DWK turns them into a relatively generic human-adjacent species called the breggle. The main difference between a breggle aristocrat and a human one seems to be whether they have fur and horns.
There’s loads of other bits that are added in and taken out. Most are minor but there’s at least one that genuinely undermines a lot of aspects of the setting.
That is the removal of half-goat mindlessness:
This may seem a minor element, but it underlies a lot of setting assumptions. Why is there not an entire caste of half-goat, half-human creatures? Because they are incapable of supporting themselves.
It also destroys a character that was introduced in DWP:
The entirety of this character in DWP is based around the fact that he is a half-goat. The character is one of the rare non-simple half-goats who has found himself in a leading role. He is cruel and puts on the affect of being more goatly than he is.
It’s funny, characterful and dark. It places the character instantly within the minds of gamemasters.
Then the DWK version completely lacks the bite of the original. One of the listed desires (“To erase the embarrassingly temperate legacy of his father and gain House Murkin the power and respect it deserves.”) was added after the goat-man racism was removed, but it doesn’t even make sense if the goat-men aren’t racists!
Lord Murkin turns from this pathetic overcompensating bully of a character, trying to act like the most goatly of goat-lords, into a confused mess because of this relatively tiny setting change.
And it’s even worse for the witches.
#3: The Witches
The witches are probably the most egregious example of the Disneyification of the setting. The above images are the monster entries for the Witch between WS and DWK.
You don’t even have to read the description to see the neutering, just look at the traits:
The two actual horrors on there are removed in favour of pure Disney bullshit. We go from devilish witchcraft to Snow White simply through the removal of two sentences.
There is an expansion on witches in WS Issue #8 and the DWK Campaign book, which makes the differences pretty fucking clear.
The similarities:
Both canon of witches are in a pact with a wood-god (also called a gwyrigon).
Both canon of witches gain magic from their pact.
Both canon of witches exist as a sort of secret society within the Dolmenwood.
The key differences:
How the pact manifests:
WS witches are explicitly impregnated by the wood-god, making them infertile.
DWK witches have their souls bound by the wood-god, turning them into the wood-god’s eyes.
The cost of the pact:
WS witches pay in dreams, sexual energy and menstrual blood which the wood-god feeds on, along with their infertility.
DWK witches do not actually seem to pay anything except potentially dreams. There is no mention of them being infertile.
The strictness of the rules:
WS witches are expected to pretend to worship devils instead of admit to the existence of the wood-gods. They also are expected to be celibate except for yearly sex-parties with the wood-god avatars.
DWK witches simply have a requirement to keep the gwyrigons safe from external attack or tampering as a restriction.
A final tidbit:
WS witches are expected to subject women to wood-demon mind rape if they are annoyed by a normal woman: “A mortal woman who crosses a witch must be brought before her coven and exposed to the presence of a gwyrigon. If the woman survives with her sanity intact, she is accepted into the sisterhood.
(Witches who are initiated in this way are known as grey sisters.)”
It’s like they peeled the face off the WS witches and slapped it onto something else. All the terminology and the names are there, but the actual lore is completely different.
Witches in WS are villainous. They are the monstrous witches from The VVitch. They are the horrible coven from Hereditary or the fucked up paganists from Midsommar.
Their whole thing is sexual folk horror.
And that’s completely missing from the DWK.
The End
The goatmen and witches are illustrative of what has happened to Dolmenwood across the board:
Wormskin has a really evocative, dark and characterful setting element.
Patreon has the above with some of the rougher edges filed off, but they can be relatively easily reattached.
Kickstarter has the above with anything that might be construed as offensive removed, taking out all the interesting elements along with it.
These are just the examples that I’m aware of. There’s loads of little bits, and you’d probably be hard pressed to find a paragraph that originated in Wormskin that hasn’t been changed in some fundamental way.
Remember the quote from Exalted Funeral:
The full campaign setting books include almost everything from Wormskin
In the immortal words of Maury Povich: “The test results show: That was a lie.”
A lot of these changes were made after a very successful $1.4mil Kickstarter. I imagine a lot of people who were hoping for an extension of Wormskin, something built on the foundation of those zines, are feeling disappointed in this.
I certainly am. The whole thing feels like a bait-and-switch.
I can’t even speak to the changes that have been made before any of the books hit “shelves”:
What was changed before it even reached the censorious internet crowd?
Did any of the authors self-censor for the sake of not having to go back and change it?
How much of the life essence of Dolmenwood has been sucked out to be make a palatable product rather than a genuinely engaging setting?
There is a lot of material in the DWP and DWK that has been added after the Wormskin run was over.
At least 8/10ths of it has been written post-Wormskin. And the Wormskin material in there has been heavily censored or removed.
An ant’s fart of that material is as strong as anything from Wormskin, and most of that has been removed for fear of a horde of internet moaners who can’t let fantasy be fantastical.
That is my core issue here. I think that good quality settings and material and novels need to be true to the writer. As soon as you start trying to appease and appeal to the masses, you lose a lot of the worth in what you are making. It doesn’t resonate as strongly because you lose your truth of it.
And that is what happens when you take away the harsh edges of dark fantasy. Dark fantasy is a broken mirror of the real world. It distorts and cuts when touched. That’s the entire fucking point.
When you try to tape it back together, make it safe and friendly, it stops being dark fantasy.
You just end up with a Disney version of what you started out with.
UPDATE 1: 24/08/2024
Gavin responded to a comment on the Kickstarter page referencing this article:
Unfortunately, I was sent evidence from the Dolmenwood Patreon Discord showing that at least one of the changes around the goatmen is down to external influence:
Shortly after this, the goatmen were changed. It’s entirely possible that Gavin views changing stuff at other people’s behest to be making it more tonally consistent. I don’t think that’s the case.
UPDATE 2: 30/08/2024
I’ve been told there is an ongoing project by the hacker known as 4chan titled “Dolmenwood Uncensored” the goal of which is to replace the pieces of material that were removed due to external influence.
I am unable to endorse the use of likely copyrighted material in this way. To avoid seeing it, you should avoid the 4chan /tg/ board and particularly any OSR threads there.
It’s obvious to me that the Wormskin Dolmenwood still has a lot of fans and people who are interested in seeing the genuine creative vision that it had in place.
Gorgonmilk here. I have had similar points brought to me before about the general direction of Dolmenwood, and while I understand the sentiments, I think the dark undercurrent of Wormskin is still there. Gavin has made things more palatable on the surface to a wider audience in the interest of appealing to a larger sector of the RPG market and avoiding controversy, but he's also added a ton of material that wasn't there in the Wormskin days. All of this is part of why I stepped back. I'm nowhere near as prolific a writer/layout artist as Gavin, and I'm generally more intractable when it comes to altering the work. Gavin is creating for himself as well as others. I'm way more selfish and consequently less successful. I've been in hibernation for a long time. I would love any pointers as to where to publish dark fantasy material.
I'm so glad I still have the Wormskin zines and the DWP 'final' PDFs. The kickstarter is an embarassment, and I'm glad I backed out of it when he announced the first of these changes as I could see the trend coming already.