Early Modern Magic

I read some interesting stuff this week on magical belief in the early modern era. Specifically, magic used for protection from weapons, surely a common interest of soldiers of the era and D&D adventures alike.

A Historical Fencer's Primer on Late Medieval and Early Modern Magic

From the German Wikipedia, the concept of "Gefrorner" which meant to be invulnerable to harm.

And finally, a scholarly article: "Invincible blades and invulnerable bodies: weapons magic in early-modern Germany" from the European Review of History.

80s Action Cartoons Were Very Gameable

I'm not just talking about the usual suspects like Thundarr the Barbarian or The Pirates of Darkwater; or ones that already have games like G.I. Joe, Transformers, or of course, Dungeons & Dragons. Even the deeper cuts are great too. Let's take a look at a sampling and the gaming inspiration they provide.

Sky Commanders (1987)

If you're a fan of hexcrawls or even pointcrawls, could I interest you in high elevation, feature-to-feature exploration? The premise is a new continent has arisen in the Pacific thanks to some weird energy source, and a multi-national group of mountaineering-specialist good-guys fight the baddies via flight, or by using "laser cables," a fancy rappelling line shot from combat backpacks. There are all sorts of environmental hazards to contend with too, and some monsters.

Spiral Zone (1987)

The high concept takeaway here might be G.I. Joe meets the Walking Dead. In the show, an evil scientist and his Road Warrior refugee have released a weird, bioactive mist (the Spiral Zone) that turns the people in it into mindless zombies. A crack team of agents and their tricked-out vehicles and protective suits do battle with the badguys. A twist is that both sides want to limit civilian casualties as the bad guys want to use them, and the good guys want to save them. 

Defenders of the Earth (1986)

While this team-up of several King Features Syndicate characters against Ming the Merciless might seem like a low-powered supers thing (and in some ways it is), the takeaway here, I think, is genre crossover. You've got a sword & planet guy, a pulp hero (or two), and a wizard who get together to take out a villain.

The Pulp Team

As with several genres adapted to rpgs, pulp gaming presents a little bit of a problem going from the inspirational fiction to the gaming table in that pulp fiction/movies/comics tend to be about solo heroes or a primary hero and sidekicks but rpgs tend to be about a group of equals. It's perhaps reasonable to play Indy plus Short Round and Sallah or even Doc Savage plus his Fabulous Five for one story arc, but it might not be as desirable for a long campaign.

On the other hand, a group composed of Indiana Jones, Jake Cutter (from Tales of the Gold Monkey), and Sam Spade may be fine for some, but seems to be less satisfying to me for a long-term campaign, because the characters don't see cohesive. 

The solution seems to me to build a group wherein the characters are roughly equal, but each has their own specialty, and they have the same theme/subgenre. Sort of like if the Fabulous Five didn't have a Doc Savage to outshine them. There are really more examples of this in comics rather than the pulps (though that may just be my knowledge of the pulps is less). Check out the Challengers of the Unknown:

Having the same subgenre is important for keeping power levels similar. Having the same sort of theme is important for helping support their reason for staying together as a group. Of course, both of these can be stretched a bit. 

Sometimes teams are brought together or forced to stay together by an outside force. DC Comics' The Secret Six and Suicide Squad (either the Silver Age nonsupers version or the later supers versions) are examples of this, but so is the more eccentrically charactered League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. For that matter, the Avengers, particularly in the Ultimate Universe and the CMU start out like this too.

Magic Like This

 I'd like to see a traditional fantasy rpg with magic like this:

Podmore picked up his fork and stood it on its end. Snaith stood, stepped over to the shelf behind Arthur’s head, and picked up a sharp knife. Moving by instinct, Arthur reached out and knocked over Snaith’s wine-glass. Snaith slipped on spilled borscht. He lay on his back looking confused, as if he had no idea what had just happened or why he’d stood up in the first place...

...Arthur said, “George—I’m sorry.” 

He snapped the stem of his wineglass, causing the leg of George’s chair to snap so that he fell on the floor and hit his head on the chair behind him. The dowager dame who’d been sitting in that chair gave a little shriek, then got to her feet and left, taking her party with her. A couple of waiters quickly came and led George off, bleeding from the head, in search of first aid. 

- Felix Gilman, The Revolutions

And this:

Her bedroom was still dark when Sadie woke up and there was a lump in her throat. She turned her head and coughed, and spat a stone into her hand. It was the size of her thumbnail, chalky white and light as a feather. Its dimpled surface was covered all around with tiny holes, and when she held it up to her ear she could hear wind in the treetops of a faraway forest.

She mixed a resin and coated the stone several times, until it was as hard and shiny as a nut, then took it outside where the morning sky had begun to turn pink along the horizon. She set the stone in the middle of the long trail that ran south from her house, through ruined cornfields and over the Arkansas River.

She left the stone there and went inside, laid back down in her bed and went to sleep.

- Alex Grecian, Red Rabbit

The last quote is the beginning of a sequence of events wherein the "stone" is picked up by a squirrel which is in turn carried away by a hawk, dropped and eaten by a fox, which is in turn killed and eaten by the man the stone is a message for. He chips a tooth on it before realizing what it is, putting it up to his ear, and hearing the witch's message.

In both of these works, magic isn't visually fantastic or flashy. Not at all like super-powers. But it is nonetheless powerful and mostly quick without a lot of ceremony. I suspect there are modern/occult rpgs with magic like this, but I'm unaware of any traditional, Medievalish fantasy with it, but I'd like to see it.

Weird Revisited: Untrue North

My recent trip to Alaska brought to mind this old post from 2011...

An arctic of only (melting) ice is sort of boring, don’t you think? At least in comparison to the flights of Age of Exploration fancy. Why settle for mere ice when you could have a magnetic Black Rock, a swirling whirlpool, and islands of pygmies? Check out this 1595 map:

Gerard Mercator based his maps and his descriptions (in a letter to John Dee in 1577) off older works. He describes a landmass divided into four lands by channels through which water rushed into the whirlpool surrounding the Pole, and "descends into the earth just as if one were pouring it through a filter funnel.” This unusual geography supposedly led to the deaths of 4,000 men from the expedition King Arthur sent to the island, according to Mercator's report. The ultimate source of this version of pole is believed to be the account in the Inventio Fortunata, a 14th Century work which is unfortunately lost.

At the pole itself, in the center of the maelstrom, was a giant, black mountain, Rupes Nigra--the Black Rock or Black Precipice. Mercator writes: “Its circumference is almost 33 French miles, and it is all of magnetic stone. And is as high as the clouds...” Its magnetism was said draw ships made with iron nails to their doom.

A really interesting adventuring site, I think.

Preparing for a New Campaign

I think my group will finish up our current campaign in the Land of Azurth this year, and though with months to go some plenty of time to change my mind, I'm in the mood for something different. With a semi-new edition of D&D arriving around that time and other, similar options available (Shadow of the Weird Wizard, 13th Age--possibly with a 2nd edition) it will be a good time to do it, too. My prerequisites are that the system be close enough to D&D so as not to cause undue angst for my players who don't always appreciate new systems and so I have an easy time finding/adapting published material. My experience running at a regular clip for 10 years now is that I need to use premade material a lot to keep it going.

Right now, I'm thinking about expanding on the world introduced in my recent "Draconic Empire" post. Inspired by my recent consumption of some anime with the Japanese version of "generic D&D fantasy" I think that's what it will be with influence from the two settings of various editions of the Sword World rpg and Uresia, as well as hints of more console game-inspired settings like BREAK!!, Fabula Ultima, Exalted, and Icon (though more "standard D&D" than any of those). I also want to utilize as much official D&D "lore" and character options as possible to keep it familiar, though they may be given a slight twist.

Additionally, I'd like to try to capture the passage of time better, something like Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, so I think I'll try to use the Fellowship and Journey rules from One Ring (or it's 5e adaptation).

Got to Catch Them All

Inspired by Vance mostly, people have considered spells as living entities. It was discussed in the Gplus days, and it shows up in Eric Diaz's Dark Fantasy Magic. Back in 2011, before I had really read a whole lot of Vance, the Vancian magic of D&D and the film Pontypool got me imagining spells as a neurolinguistic virus or memetic entity.

Anyway, all that as preamble to a related idea which I'm sure someone has had before but came to me seeing my daughter play Pokemon Go. If spells are living things in some fashion and wizards are forced to adventure to find them and master them, aren't they kind of like Pokemon? Eldritch viruses or self-assembling arcane subroutines. Free-living (at least currently) cheat codes to the universe. Things to be captured and tamed and bent to will of the mage.

I think this sort of framing could make the finding and learning of spells on scrolls more interesting (or at least more challenging), and I think it would definitely suggest interesting things that could be used to develop the background the campaign world.

Star Frontiers "Appendix N"

Jim Burns

Star Frontiers has a list of "Reading for Fun and Ideas" but (and I'm not the first to point this out) it's really just a grab-bag of good and/or classic science fiction. The relationship between the list and SF's explicit and implied setting and the sort of elements that would show up in a game are elusive. It isn't anything like a "how-to" manual.

So I thought it was worth coming up with a list of inspirational media that is more to the point. This will be my perspective; I make no claims about what works the original authors made in mind. I will, though, at least for the works I dub "core," try to stick to works that could have been inspirations back in 1982.

The Core

General features: A lack of focus on cybernetics, dystopia, interaction with inscrutable aliens, common psi, or space empires. They tend to have generally a more upbeat (at least not brooding or dour) tone and a focus on adventure rather than tech. 

CJ Cherryh - The Pride of Chanur. Interesting but accessible aliens. space trading. 

Alan Dean Foster - Humanx Commonwealth series, particularly the subseries of the Adventures of Flinx and Pip. Strong human-alien cooperation (and with insectoid aliens), conflict with another alien species, unusual planets for adventure.

Andre Norton - Solar Queen series. Corporate-centered space travel and free-trading. Mysteries of previous civilizations on isolated worlds.

Jack Vance - The Demon Princes series. Travel between core worlds and a frontier region, Space criminals and cops. Strange societies.

                     Planet of Adventure series. Stranded on an alien planet after a crash with a lot of weird stuff going on.

Ralph McQuarrie

The Frontier

These works are either post-1982, have fewer elements of homology to the Star Frontiers setting, or both.

Brian Daley - Han Solo Adventures series. fast-paced adventure, human-nonhuman cooperation.

                     Hobert Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh series. friendly aliens, humorous and picaresque.

Edmond Hamilton and others - Captain Future series. space criminals and mad scientists. A smaller number of worlds.

Film/TV:

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. More action pulp than serious sci-fi. Costume design aesthetic of roughly the same era as the game.

Firefly. Smaller setting. ragtag crew like a PC party.

Comic Books/Strips:

Atari Force vol. 2. '80s science fiction aesthetics, friendly humanoid aliens.

Star Hawks. Space law enforcement.

Star Wars. The post-Empire Strikes Back era of the comic has aesthetics not unlike the game, and the comic and comic strip at times have more general Space Opera plots.

A More Civilized Age

Art by Donato Giancola

I'm all for "lived-in futures" and dusty, grubby space Westerns, but I feel like there are some science fiction aesthetics that don't get their due. And I'm not talking gleaming, featureless rocket hulls and silver lamé outfits. I mean the more refined, swashbuckling, adventure film derived style.

Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon was probably the biggest feature in promoting this style, but it shows up in other places like Cody Starbuck by Howard Chaykin:

And in Milady 3000 and i Briganti by Magnus (Roberto Raviola):

It's not really absent from the Star Wars saga. It just shows up more in the prequels than in the original films. I think there's a hint of it in Lynch's Dune and the SyFy mini-series version--though it is sorely lacking from the drear Villeneuve version.

The Woods are Dark and Deep

This half-formed rpg setting idea I got the other day. It could probably work with something D&Dish but might be better suited to something else. Anyway, the world that the players' would know and explore is a sort of mythic forest, a dark fairytale sort of woodland with no apparent beginning or end. Within the woodland are areas of human habitation, where everyone probably speaks the same language, and probably some enigmatic ruins, suggesting perhaps a once united human culture or series of cultures, but nothing like that exists in the present and nothing more than fables that hold any memory of it. Memory, like everything else, gets swallowed by the forest.

The woodland can be a strange place. There are dangers there, even horrors, but there are also places of beauty and enchantment. These last are perhaps hard to find again after visiting, though.  Adventurers are wanderers in the wood, dealing with the things the forest brings them.

I envision it as something like an adult, darker Over the Garden Wall. Perhaps with a bit of Ravenloft with the forest replacing the Mists. The forest might give a similar uncanny vibe to the Zone in the film Stalker. Other inspirations: Grimm's fairytales and the film Company of Wolves. Maybe some stuff from the rpg Symbaroum though it's a bit less "Brother's Grimm meets Acid Western" than what I'm envisioning.

The Cleric and the Rituals of Faith

Over the weekend, I read this interesting blog series about how polytheism worked in the real world. Check it out. 

Anyway, it got me thinking about how D&D/rpg polytheism might be made more realistic without changing it much. Granted, it's a bit of an uphill battle since rpg polytheism of the D&D variety is very unrealistic in a lot of ways, but I'm going to focus here on one thing and that's Devereaux's central point in the early articles: religion is mainly about ritual not metaphysics.

This is actually pretty good for the D&D cleric, because they are largely soft on metaphysics and philosophy (short a lot of worldbuilding) but out-of-the-box do a lot of things like spells and special abilities that could be glossed (and roleplayed) as rituals. It's sort of transactional, even mechanistic from a modern lens, which is good for D&D because that's what clerical magic is. 

So, clerics are the most religious (in what Devereaux relates is the Roman sense) because they have the most effective deity-related rituals (spells) and they are the most diligent in their performance (it's their job). The use of the cleric to the adventuring party is this very religiousness: their ritual performances always get results. 

I think it would take relatively little roleplaying in this direction and reframing of these abilities in a more religious ritual context to make it feel a lot less merely mechanistic and a lot more flavorfully mechanistic.

Sail the Microversal Seas!

Artist Jeff Nelson has imagined Marvel's Microverse from the Micronauts comic as islands in a sea. Only tangentially related, but this reminds me how the Microverse would be a good Spelljammer setting.

The Mixed Up Setting

 

Sometimes, always with an eye toward being able to use the published material for some well-supported game or another, I get (possibly mad) idea to take parts of one setting and combine with another so that the result wouldn't immediately be recognizable.

Ideas I've had in the past playing a wuxia game using the map of Middle-Earth (and MERP materials), The Known World replaced with Talislanta equivalents, or Creation from Exalted, but built as a D&D setting (using published 5e material).

I've never done any of these as at the end of the day the work required wouldn't be that much less than making up my own stuff in some instances, but it's still an idea that pops up from time to time.

From

I've recently started watching the Epix (now MGM+) TV series From on a free preview. It's the story of a family that find themselves stranded in a small town where no one can leave and they are beset each night by apparently supernatural creatures that appear human, but are not. As a setting and situation, it's the sort of thing I've called a mystery sandbox before--though there's always the chance it will be revealed to be more of a sort of mystery terrarium where the true mysteries are other than what they initially appear. I'm only 4 episodes in, so it's hard to say!

Reviews tend to compared it to Lost, which is not completely off-base, but  think it's a bit lazy and possibly inspired by the presence of Harold Perrineau as the town sheriff. More apt comparisons I think are in the works of Stephen King. You've got a family where the parents have some relationship stress, a kid who has supernatural insights, and an eclectic group of characters, some of whom are dangerous to the others. It's perhaps a bit less volatile than how King would mix those elements, because it's meant to potentially last longer. So maybe it's a mix of a Lost-type show and a King work--the second one of it's type, since King's book The Dome was stretched into that sort of show.

Anyway,  think this sort of thing would make an interesting sort of short to medium rpg campaign. I'm sort of surprised their isn't a Powered by the Apocalypse hack to do this sort of thing, though maybe their is and I just don't know it.

The New Marvel Universe

 In 1986, Marvel launched the New Universe. It was envisioned as a more realistic setting--"the world outside your window." There were to be more subdued and limited super-powers, no gods, magic, or aliens. Jim Shooter argued this was similar to how Lee had thought of the Marvel Universe at it's inception: "the original Marvel Universe -- Stan's conception of it -- instead of doing something Superman or Green Lantern, he was really trying to do science fiction. The Fantastic Four didn't have costumes in the first issue. He was trying to be down to Earth."

Before they created the characters and books of the New Universe they had pitched a reboot of the Marvel Universe, something like the Ultimate line to come along decades later. There is no indication this reboot had the same mission statement as the New Universe, but what if it did? A more realistic Marvel Universe starting in 1986 would be interesting as a supers rpg setting, I think. 

What would that look like? I have some thoughts:

Fantastic Four: The crew of an experimental space shuttle are on their test flight when a strange white light fills the sky. They come back changed. Reed Richards has his genius intellect boosted to superhuman levels. Sue Storm develops the power to turn invisible and telekinesis. Johnny Storm develops pyrokinesis. Ben Grimm is transformed into a monster. The four stay together to fight alien threats and other strangeness as a team more Challengers of the Unknown than the original FF. 

Iron Man: Iron Man probably works the best in this lower key format, you just make the armor bulkier to seem more realistic. He is never able to reproduce the armor for the military due to some change in his physiology due to the White Event, so lesser exoskeletons and armor suits show up, but nothing on Iron Man's level.

The Hulk: The experiment that created hm would be a genetic one rather than a strictly radiation one. Perhaps something akin to the tv show? Obviously, his strength would be toned down.

Thor: An amnesiac being who has memories of another world roams the world looking for his "brother," a being he calls Loki who is head of a criminal empire. He is able to summon or create his "hammer" a weapon of pure energy to wield against his brothers minions. Thor is one of the hardest for this format, but I think he can be toned down enough to work.

Spider-Man: The White Event occurs while Peter Parker is visiting a science lab and he gets bitten by an altered spider. This one could wind up with a very different, darker tone than the original. There might be a tinge of body horror to Peter's spidery condition.

Revisiting Weird Krypton

This post originally appeared in June of 2015...

 

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Krypton.

Superman's home planet is pretty weird. Weird enough that it makes a good substitute for Carcosa in McKinney's supplement. You can keep the polychromatic humanity (that might explain the Krytonian flag). Then, check out the maps of Krypton for places to visit:

The highlights there ought to be pretty obvious, but let me fill in a couple of salient points of adventure and/or danger:

Jewel Mountains: Formed by the accumulated carcasses of prehistoric, giant crystal birds.
Gold Volcano: It should be mentioned that gold is so common on Krypton as to not be particularly valuable.
Fire Falls: A fall of a fiery fluid from the planets core, inhabited by mutant fish-snakes whose bite is poisonous.
Scarlet Jungle: An expanse of forest in red and purple, including huge maroon mushroom-like growth. It home to at least some disease-causing spores. Then,  of course, there's the herd migratory, vaguely humanoid-shaped plants.

Weird Revisited: The Anthology Crawl

This post was originally published on May 2, 2013, shortly after the death of Andrew J. Offutt.

News of Andrew J. Offutt's passing on April 30 got me to thinking about the Sword & Sorcery anthology series he edited (Swords Against Darkness) and fantasy anthologies in general. It seems to me you could use such an anthology (or anthology series) for inspiration and nonrandom "random placement" of encounters/things of interests in a hexcrawl or dungeoncrawl.

Simply pick an anthology. Read every story in it (even the duds--but skimming is ok) and pick some interesting element out of each, be it a monster, encounter, location, or item. Place these on your map in order, or arrange them to taste. You could even get more "madlibs" about it and predetermine what you were going to take from each story (an item, a place, an encounter), before you read (or re-read) the story, forcing you to stretch your creative a bit more to fit it in.

Four-Color Swords & Sorcery: Monsters!

Earl Norem

Big monsters are a hallmark of Bronze Age Four-Color fantasy of the Swords & Sorcery mode. These creatures are often are the antagonist of the "big battle" of the issue, the full manifestation of the menace posed by the main villain--and occasionally the main villain themselves. Less formidable big monsters may be an obstacle to the final confrontation with the villain.

The monsters come in a variety of forms from merely giant to gargantuan natural animals to animate statues/automata of humanoids or animal shape. Tentacled, tendriled, or pseudopod-waving creatures seem to particularly common. I suspect so their threat is made clear in a way that doesn't immediately injure the heroes or result in a Comics Code Approval imperiling amount of blood.

So are multiple heads. Both of these have the added benefit particularly in games of allowing one creature to engage multiple heroic opponents more easily.

These creatures, at least the bigger ones, are seldom defeated by hacking them until they die. In game terms, the simplest to defeat require a "critical hit" or called shot of some sort, often an injury to their eye. Others are dispatched by a trick of some sort: using the environment or their own abilities or natural weaponry against them. Finally, some can only be killed using a special item or weapon, typically obtained earlier in the adventure.

What does this meaning for emulating the genre in gaming? These are my take aways:

• Unique, big monsters need to show up regularly. Maybe not every adventure, but most of them.
• The best way to defeat the creatures should seldom be the most obvious brute force method.
• This means the GM needs to reward creative thinking by the players to handle these encounters.
• If the ways of defeating the monster are particularly limited, the means must be telegraphed to the players and be available to them.

Sword & Sandals Mystara

The Known World of Mystara is a Hyborian Age-esque fantasyland of often thinly disguised real world cultures from a variety of historical eras, but the general vibe seems Medieval to early modern. I think it would be interesting reimagine Mystara as a more ancient world inspired, Sword & Sorcery setting, though will not greater adherence to a single era. Here's how it could breakdown:

Emirate of Ylaruam: This desert region has always been oddly placed, but depending on what latitude you think it's at, it might be weird for it to be a hot desert. Maybe it's a cold desert like the Tarim Basin or the Taklamakan. You could ditch the faux Arab culture for something more Central Asian, and give it's central religion a more Eastern flavor.

Empire of Thyatis: Less Byzantium and more Rome, though I would probably move it more in a Hellenistic direction. What the Empire of Alexander might have been like if it had been able to hang together better after his death.

Grand Duchy of Karameikos: This would stll be a breakaway, former province (though not a "Grand Duchy"). There wouldn't be true, Medieval feudalism here, but something more like the Roman latifundia.

Kingdom of Ierendi: This kingdom ruled by adventurers is kind of a pure fantasy trope, but I would give its material culture a Minoan spin.

Minrothad Guilds: A plutocratic thalassocracy more like Phoenicia or Carthage. The Guilds would be collegia.

Principality of Glantri: Well, still a magocracy, but maybe more like the Estruscans?

Republic of Darokin: Keep the plutocratic republic, but cast it less as Venice and more as Republican Rome with a of the "center of caravan routes" feel like Samarkand or Palmyra. A bit of Persian influence wouldn't be misplaced as Darokin does border Sind, which is sort of Mystara's India.

The Northern Reaches would probably still just be sort of Vikings, I guess, maybe more proto-Vikings like the horned helmet wearing raiders of the Nordic Bronze Age. Ethengar might be more Scythians than Mongols. Haven't given much thought to the demihuman lands or Atraughin. 

Imagining the Hyborian Age

 The map of Conan's world by Katrin Dirim I shared the other day was interesting not just because her her artistic style (though that's great), but because of the way she chose to depict the Hyborian Age costume and material culture. The prevailing style, since the Frazetta covers have been a vague "barbaric fantasy," which each artist working their own variation on the theme.

Howard's stories, by contrast, tend to be much more "historical" in their depiction of these things--though they aren't really consistent in their historical era. Different locales in Conan's world seem to come from different points in history: there are High Medieval tales ("Hour of the Dragon", "A Witch Shall Be Born"), Golden Age of Piracy stories ("Black Stranger"), stories that seem to be set in the ancient world ("God in the Bowl"), and even stories that like ahistorical periods of a Medieval version of the 18th Century ("Beyond the Black River").

I think Dirm's idea to narrow this range a bit to make it make more sense is a good one. On Reddit, she says she capped the level of armor at roughly the early middle ages, and mixed in elements from as far back as the Bronze Age to keep the atmosphere.

I think this fits well with the more "ancient world" interpretation Mark Schultz does in volume 1 of the Wandering Star/Del Rey collection:

Some of the slight re-shifts of the names would be fairly simple. Iranistan becomes the Persian Empire (take you pick which one), and Turan instead of being a stand-in for the Ottoman Turks, are maybe the Parthians? Aquilonia and Nemedian could be recast as somewhat Carolingian Frank:

Though I have seen portrayals (and there is some support for it) that Aquilonia could be Roman!

The Age of Sail stuff in Zingara and the Barachan Isles would require the most change, but there have been pirates as long as there have been boats, so it's possible.