Interview with Daniel Harila Carlsen

We sat down to talk to Daniel Harila Carlsen, creator and designer of Duginthroat Divided. Check out his portfolio and Itch store.

What excites you most about Duginthroat Divided?

Everything about Duginthroat excites the Hellpits of Nightfang out of me, and with this being my first delve into crowdfunding. It's been humbling to see all the support.

I still think my favorite part must be how it plays and the way the components in the adventure can potentially work together. Underneath the fairly conventional adventure hooks and dress-up, Duginthroat is WEIRD. Spoilers ahead: If you're really clever, there's a pretty complicated puzzle you can solve early on to get an express lane to the inner keep. My players solved it with a henchman they made using the Rogue Rendereer in the book, and in horrible adventurer spirit, they decided to have the henchman try it first. They sent him across the crack with the contraption, and nothing happened. Suddenly, this sense of guilt spread around the table, along with a side of guilty heroism as the players suddenly realized they cared about the sharp-toothed fur-clad potty mouth they had rolled up, and they set themselves a goal to rescue him. The next time they met him was eight sessions later, and he was completely shell-shocked and changed by the inner keep, but they were just happy he wasn't dead. That was not the last time they interacted with the pipe or the emeralds you need to power it, but I'll leave it at that. 

There are so many variables in the adventure; one of the potential antagonists has yet to show up during play, as nobody has encountered him.

What drew you to using Old School Essentials (OSE) as the core system for this?

I only got into D&D-likes a few years ago (despite having run games my whole life), I played a bunch of rules-lite clones like Mörk Borg and Knave, and wanted to make adventures as cross-compatible as possible. When I read B/X, I was sold. The prose and granularity are super evocative to me, and there are some real imagination sparkers within the rules, such as the level titles, the incentive on procedural world-building, and play. I love Knave, Cairn, Errant, etc, but when I write these adventures, I want them to feel like a vintage weird book you find in your uncle's attic. You know, the uncle who wears Hawaiian shirts and preaches aggressively about psychedelic rock and its many subgenres when he's had a few. I feel like OSE is a good fit for that simulated nostalgia. It's also the lingua franca for so many tables and is super easy to convert. My home table will always progress into a lot of house rules, and the BECMI line shows an example of someone's house rules as the game changes in scale, scope, and theme. I think reading the expert rules and the strong emphasis on making it your own really helped me flesh out the additional tools and procedures as well.

What surprised you in writing this?

I had a big blank wing of the inner tunnels and started hammering out a draft for something. I had recently run the haunted amphitheatre from the excellent Valley of Flowers by the fine people in Phantom Mill, and I guess it was brewing in the background, what came out was Tonguithia, the Glistening City. Which is so weird it even left Brian Yaksha speechless.,

Tonguithia is my raw, unfiltered imagination when I unshackle it from its holding cell.

What were your influences in writing this? How did they shape your work?

The whole idea came from Astrid Lindgren's Ronja The Robber's Daughter. I really wanted Duginthroat Divided to have a strong Dreamlands influence, as it's a gold mine for weird sword and sorcery stuff. I already had a lot of moon themes in the adventure, so when I realized how many of HP Lovecraft's entities were connected to moons, it was very cognitively satisfying. When I consulted my friend, Matt Sanderson from the Blasphemous Tome, he went through his many piles of mythos licensing tomes, and it turned out none of the creatures I wanted to use were off the table. One of them was not even used in games, as far as I could tell. There are other references to other classics that are more subconscious, such as the big Ravenloft parody, which I guess just happened organically.,

It's funny, originally I wanted Duginthroat to be more like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, with the player characters being servants and staff getting lost in an eternal castle. The only element that survived the transition from that was the NPC Slitherworm. As mentioned above, I was also reading Valley of Flowers. Jedediah Berru has become somewhat of a kindred spirit as we both mix the bizarre with the classics, and the stuff he and Alex did with Gnollune is just really powerful and evocative. My writing style and a lot of the ideas draw very strongly on the recent works of Joseph R. Lewis (especially Nightmare over Ragged Hollow) and anything by the Merry Mushmen. Their stuff is just so good, you can't help but feel inspired, and I think they were a huge influence on me converting to OSE. Another big influence was Jenell Jaquays' stuff. Originally, the color scheme was gonna be a full-on rip-off of the art style from Hellpits of Nightfang, but I'm just far too comfortable using only one color.

Daniel's tribute to the cover of Jennell Jaquays' Hellpits of the Nightfang, created for her Oct. 14 birthday.

What's something you've been reading, watching, playing, or listening to recently that inspires you as a creator, and what about it resonates? Any guilty pleasures?

I consume so much media, it's insane. Yesterday, my wife and I went to a really cool cinema to watch the uncut version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis with a live orchestra doing a modern soundtrack, and it was otherworldly. There were bass lines during the decadent, moody noir parts that slapped HARD. If they were still alive, I wish MF Doom and Ol Dirty Bastard would rap over that in the same style as their early recordings.

I try to read 50 pages of words on paper every day. Right now, I'm revisiting Treasure Island for a new campaign I'm starting up, where I'm gonna bash together Isle of Dread and Caverns of Thracia. The book is a limited print from a Norwegian book club from the 70s, and it's one of my favorite books I own. It's a three-column layout in a weird 12"x12" format with technical illustrations and crude treasure maps, and these wild kraft paper pages with ship illustrations that I suspect were done using riso, spot coloring, or screen printing. Being a kid in the 60s-80s must have been so cool when all that stuff was equivalent of ten bucks.

I'm also reading through the latest installment in Alex Phlebys Waterblack, the third installment in his Cities of the Wren trilogy, which came out earlier this year. His stuff is phenomenal and demonstrates how cool fantasy can be when you drop the pop culture and Hollywood nonsense.

My wife and I have also watched The Animals of Farthing Wood and Silverfang. Sometimes you're just in the mood for social realism about cute cartoon animals going through horrible trials. 

Artwise, I just discovered Jim Cawthorne's stuff when I ordered his collected works from his sister's webshop, and I was so inspired and excited about the raw underground style that's representative throughout his entire career. He never got dull and always carried along his passions for different media and DIY fanzine culture. His Elric covers are out of this world. As an illustrator, I think he's like everything I want to be like.

Guilty pleasures? I don't believe in those, but it is annoying how my wife's been obsessively listening to the Smiths. Those songs have tainted my mind. I caught myself humming a lot of the tracks from the Meat Is Murder record, and I shook my fist at the skies as I realized I know all of Morrisey's early work by heart now.

What are you planning to work on next?

MAN, there's some crazy cool stuff happening. I've been part of a team with Ole Peder Gjævee and Martin Gudmundsen, the creators of the story game Itras By that came out years ago, I can't say much about the project but it's gonna be a "hack" that's gonna take some very tasteful stab at modern pretensions of what a playstyle is as well as all the tribalistic puritarian orcdung happening in all camps of the hobby these days. It's gonna be cool, wait for it.

I'm also writing an adventure inspired by Don Rosa's early Scroodge stuff about Klondike. 

I'm alongside some very talented people, illustrating the next volumes of Wildendrem with Jed and Alex as well. There are some real contemporary super talents on board for that, e.g., Amanda Lee Franck.

I'm illustrating James Rengas Cairn adventure "The Beekeepers Tithe." Renga is a really, really good designer and is making some stuff with Melsonian Art Council as well.

I'm also churning away at Beefy Shotgun Wizards, with Robert Drummond, whom I met while writing Curious Creeps, but we're on hiatus as Rob just had his third goblin child.

I do regular jobs for Duck and Crow Press as well. They have a great focus on ethics and quality and are the only people in the business I know of that are making tournament dungeons.

I also do several commissions every week.