[Book Club] A Dungeon Hiding in Blindsight (part 1)

This is the second in a series of chats between Anne of DIY & Dragons and me about dungeoncrawling (or dungeoncrawling inspiring) science fiction. This installment's topic: Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Trey: So, obviously (like Roadside Picnic) Blindsight isn't strictly a "dungeoncrawl" novel--but I think it has some interesting things that might inform dungeoncrawls.

Anne: It certainly has a section of dungeon-like exploration. And one that's kind of consistent with a scifi mini-tradition of people using clones or backups to explore an alien space so deadly that it requires multiple "lives" to traverse.

Trey: Yes. It's a "killer dungeon" as many sci-fi ones are.

Anne: I'm thinking of Aldis Budrys's Rogue Moon and Robert Silverburg's The Man in the Maze as the earliest examples I'm aware of. But Alistair Reynolds's "Diamond Dogs" novella would be another more recent example. I think I've jumped the gun a bit here though. We should probably say a little more about Blindsight generally before getting into the details.

Trey: Good point! Blindsight concerns what happens after Earth receives an alien visitation (not unlike Roadside Picnic in that regard!), but technology is advanced enough that humans can pinpoint where the visit came from in the edge of our solar system and sends first probes and then a (trans)human team to intercept. What they find isn't some more and fuzzy first contact, but a vast and alien intellect with which no communication is really possible. An intellect that wants humanity dead. It takes a while for the team to piece this together though, but all the while the alien is trying to kill them.

Anne: It's been a few years since I read it, so forgive me if I'm remembering wrong, but the near-lethal dungeon is a kind of trap, isn't it? The alien made something that was almost too dangerous, but just safe enough that the team would give in to the temptation to explore it. And while they're focused on the threat of the environment, the alien intellect is up stuff in the background.

Trey: The alien lives in a high radiation environment so some things are hostile because they just are, but it is effectively experimenting on the explorers. This is killer dungeon where the dungeon and the monsters are inseparable.

Anne: "Inseparable" is a good way of putting it! The amount of connection between the intelligence (which calls itself "Rorschach"), the space the human team is exploring, and the monsters that live inside that space is one of the few things the team successfully learns.

Trey: Yes, it's an interesting concept we haven't quite gotten in dungeon ecology (I don't think). The living dungeon where the monsters aren't just local fauna/flora but essentially cells in a great body. I'm sure someone has suggested that, but I've never seen it actually carried through.

Anne: The dungeon as body of giant monster is more of a scifi concept than a fantasy one, and it does lend itself to drawing on real-world biology as a starting point. The film Fantastic Voyage (with the shrink ray and submarine going inside a human body) is one approach, but it focuses on the sense of wonder, and maybe the didactic opportunity, more than the unsettling or horrific feeling you could get from realizing that the dungeon itself is alive.

Trey: I think it's perhaps rpgs have tended to be rather conservative in their approach to fantasy. From a practical standpoint that presents a low bar to entry, perhaps. There are rpgs with living dungeons though, 13th Age, for instance. Mostly nonbiological but I think there have been a couple of those.

Anne: The Borg Cubes in Star Trek are kind of like living dungeons. I mean, the ships themselves are entirely mechanical, although they function more like bodies than like starships. The Borg themselves are cyborgs, but their bodies seem to be mostly robotic, with only a vestige of biology remaining. In that case, the individual Borg are kind of like cells within the body. 

Trey: Very true! It strikes me that the Rorschach and its cells introduce a way to deal with the problem of the typical, distasteful narrative of dungeoneer in D&D. If dungeons arrive unbidden and spew forth creatures that you can't communicate with and want to kill you, well clearing them out is a bit easier to justify.

It's kind of the premise of my "Apocalypse Underground" series of posts from years back.

Anne: I wonder if that's something that living dungeons often have in common? They represent a threat that almost has to be explored because of the danger it poses. Roadside Picnic's like that too - the Zone appears one night, and everything inside it is contaminated and ruined by its appearance. At least some of the people going in are the ones who were displaced by it showing up.

Trey: That's a good thought. People who are displaced and lose their homes and livelihoods may need what valuables can be wrested from the dungeons.

to be continued

Weird Revisited: The Dungeon Mad God Machine

This post originally appeared in 2017...

 

Seeing Alien: Covenant yesterday, which (no real spoilers) carries a theme from Prometheus (and from Frankenstein, ultimately) of lesser beings meddling in creation of life, gave me an idea. I've written before (and it's sort of baked into the rules in any case, most explicitly in BECMI) about dungeons in D&D being an engine of apotheosis.

What if dungeons didn't just create gods or god-like being? What if they tended to create mad ones? All those weird D&D monsters are waved off as the products of crazy wizards, but maybe they're more specifically the product of crazy, god-level wizards?

In fact, it's possible dungeons weren't originally a tool of apotheosis at all. One mad race, the Engineers (or Dungeoneers) did came upon that accidentally. The first dungeons were their laboratories, their three dimensional journals of magical experimentation. A delve into one charts (and recapitulates) their ascension to post-mortaldom--and their descent in madness. A dungeon then, is a living blasphemous tome, recording secrets man was not meant to know.

It goes without saying that probably all life in the campaign world began their. Everything crawled up from the depths, evolving away from its original purpose to its current form. Unless of course, that evolution was the point. The Dungeoneers might have felt they would only have arrived at godhood when they could create beings that could follow in their footsteps--or maybe even challenge their supremacy. Perhaps there's another, higher level game and they need soldiers, or experimental subjects, to win it?

Return to Planet Funhouse Dungeon

Back in 2016, I wrote a post suggesting that there had never really been a sci-fi rpg equivalent of old D&D in the sense there had never really been a gonzo, promiscuously borrowing from all sorts of media sci-fi game of exploration that is generic. I think that statement is still largely true, if we limit it to games that really capture the gaming zeitgeist. Currently, horror science fiction hybrids seem to the order of the day.

It's true that gonzo/less serious science fiction has never been its most popular form in other media, but I feel like it's as popular as it has ever been with Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, and less popular but still big budget movies like Jupiter Ascending and Valerian.

The think, though, that the best model for a game of this sort is a show from nearly 60 years ago: the original Lost in Space. Sure it was aimed at kids and the amount of money spent on episodes left it with special effects like something from a decade earlier in comparison to Star Trek, but the mix of the lack of concern for serious science fiction (or logic at times) that came from making a kid-focused so combined with chasing the aesthetic of the popular Batman tv show, created encounters with the "unknown" that would be at home in any old school goofy dungeoncrawl.

A vending machine that can deliver androids to order--but then you have to pay for them. Faceless aliens in besparkled bowler hats. A space prospector that look like a miner forty-niner (complete with mule) but is blasting away to find an element that can create (or bestow) life. Space hillbillies. The Great Vegetable Rebllion.

Of course, Lost in Space has a bounded setting--and I think this is important. The Space Family Robinson are lost and marooned for most of the show on first one planet then another. This makes there adventures closer to a dungeoncrawl or at least wilderness crawl of a specific area. Of course, we never see the Robinson's methodically exploring, but there isn't a lot of ten foot pole poking around in Sword & Sorcery fiction either. If you want that sort of thing nothing stops you from doing it. 

In any case, I think the appeal of a science fiction campaign limited to one world, like Vance's Planet of Adventure or Lost in Space, but a world that is pretty gonzo as appeal.

Weird Revisited: In the Blood

This post originally appeared almost 10 years ago to the day...

 

The element iron has a special status: it carries oxygen on our blood; it’s the most abundant element in the earth’s crust; and it has the most stable atomic nuclei. More to the point for fantasy gaming: "cold iron" is said to ward off or harm fairies, ghosts, and/or witches.

In the novel Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington, magical attitude is inversely related to iron in the blood. A necromancer explains it this way:

“Iron, as I’ve told you, is one of the only symbols that represents what it truly is, here and on the so-called Platonic level of reality...Because it is true material and not just a symbol of something else, iron restricts our ability to alter the world, be it talking to spirits or commanding symbols or however you put it.”

Not only does this nicely tie some of the real properties of iron with its folklore properties, but it would have some interesting implications in fantasy games. Prohibitions against metal armor and the working of magic make sense in this light. Even more interestingly, it might it explain why D&D mages tend to be physically sort of weak--they need to be somewhat less robust in order to work magic well. Maybe higher Constitution scores actually impairs magic, or impairs the “level” a mage can advance too? That might also example the traditional dwarven poor magic aptitude: they’re hardy, creatures of the earth (where iron’s abundant).

Choice of Primary Ability Score

While it's not the only reason, one of the primary motivations beyond removing racial ability bonuses in 5e (and D&D One) is so every race can be optimal at every class. Whether optimized race/class combos are a thing one feels like is necessary, it seems to me the unasked question here is my are classes still tied to specific abilities to begin with? Why can't you have a dexterity based fighter or even an intelligence based one? They'd be a bit different "in the fiction" from a strength-based fighter, but wouldn't that be part of the fun?

I know primary ability scores are still a thing for legacy reasons, but if you can given up racial ability bonuses (and penalties!) and broaden spellcasters to be able to use various ability scores for spellcasting, then I hardly think this is a bridge too far.

The Known World in the Real World

I've previously re-imagined Karameikos as a state in the Balkans. I don't think it's the only D&D setting Known locale that would be easy to translate into fictional countries in the real world. Here are some others:

Darokin: An alpine microstate and republic (like it's larger neighbor, Switzerland), likely descended from the kingdom of the Lombards. It's a modern banking center.

Glantri: A city-state near the Italian-Slovenian border, landlocked, but not far from the Adriatic.

Ierendi: A volcanic archipelago, part of Macronesia, in the North Atlantic.

The Isle of Dread: A mysterious island in the South Pacific.

And here's a now a non-Known World one:

Barovia: A small region in the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe.

Weird Revisited: Ozian D&D

The original version of this post appeared in 2017 after a bit of discussion on Google+ about Oz-influenced D&D. With two 5e Oz supplements currently available, it seems like it's still a current topic.

From its conception, Oz has been an important (though certainly not the only) influence on the Land of Azurth (particularly for the primary campaign site, Yanth Country), so I've thought some about how Ozian elements can be used to inform D&D fantasy.

First off, it must be acknowledged that "Ozian fantasy" may not be a precisely defined thing. The portrayal of Oz itself changes from the first book to later books by Baum--and to an even greater degree throughout the "Famous Forty" and beyond. Oz in the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is mostly uninhabited, and the places that are inhabited are mostly agrarian, but later books pile on more and more civilization. Baum's vision is of an American fairytale, and so the early books lack standard European-derived or Arabian Nights-inspired creatures and characters: The Tin Man is a woodsman not a knight. Ultimately, however, knights, dragons, and genies all become part of Oz.

(Anyone interested in Baum's American fairytale conception and examples of it in his non-Oz fantasies should check out Oz & Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum by Michael O. Riley)

With that sort of lack of specificity in mind, here are my broad suggestions for how to make a D&D campaign more Ozian:

Lost worlds/hidden kingdoms instead of dungeons: Whether standard D&D or Oz, exploration and discovery plays a part, but D&D's exploration sites are often known areas of material wealth and danger near settled areas that are usually purposefully visited to be exploited. Ozian sites are unknown or little known areas, accidentally discovered, like the lost worlds of adventure fiction.

Animated Simulacra and Talking Animals instead of the usual demihumans: Both D&D and Oz have nonhuman characters, but Oz’s are more individual, not representatives of "races." They also aren't the near-human types of elves, dwarves, and halflings. In fact, all of those races would probably fall under the "human" category in Oz. (In the first book, most Ozites are short like halflings, not just the Munchkins).

Social interaction/comedy of manners instead of combat or stealth: Violence and death sometimes occurs in the Oz books, but conversation and timely escape are the most common ways of dealing with problems. While this may in part be due to them being century plus year-old children's books, some of the exchanges in Dorothy and the Wizard are not dissimilar to the ones that occur in the works of Jack Vance, albeit with much less wit or sophistication. No Ozian villain is too fearsome not to be lectured on manners--at least briefly.

Magical mundane items or magical technology instead of magical weapons: The noncombat orientation of Oz extends to magic items. Magic belts, mirrors, food dishes, etc., occur in Oz but few magic swords or the like that you see in D&D or European legend. Oz blurs the lines between science/technology and magic to a degree. (The examples of this that are more Steampunkian or magictech seem to be unique inventions, however.) Pills and tablets will fantastical (though perhaps not magical in the sense the term would understood in Oz) properties are more common than potions, for instance. In general, foodstuff with fantastic properties, both natural and created, are more common than in D&D.

Faux-America instead Faux-Medieval: Ozian society seems almost 19th century in its trappings, or more precisely, it is a society that is not foreign (except where it specifically means to be) to the a young reader in the early 20th century. It lacks most of the elements of the real world of the 19th Century, however, like industry, social conflict (mostly), and (sometimes) poverty. It also lacks complicated social hierarchies: there is royalty, but no nobility.

Olshevsky's Marvel Time Revisited

I had forgotten I had written a post about this back in 2018. I've updated it a bit here. To allow their characters to stay evergreen, both Marvel and DC have established "sliding timelines" so that the present is always today, and modern Heroic Ages of their respective universes are only 10 or 15 (or some less specified number) of years old.

(There is some evidence Dan DiDio was looking to kind of abandon this at DC in favor of "generations," but then he got the boot before he could do it.)

As I've mentioned before, this was not always the case. George Olshevsky's Marvel indices argue that in the early years, Marvel seemed to preceded in real time. While most are unfazed by this, at least this guy thinks abandoned it ruined the Marvel Universe. While I wouldn't go that far, I do think there are certainly tradeoffs. The eternal present comes at the sacrifice of allowing characters to truly grow and inevitably means big changes are impermanent.

Anyway, here are the "Marvel Years" as outlined by Olshevsky. He measures them by years in Peter Parker's life. The actual calendar years are my addition and relate to the most likely real-world translation (if your were inclined to do that) based on the time of publication.

YEAR ONE [1960-1961] (PP-HS-SophY):
June*- FF spaceflight.
Sept. - Peter Parker is a junior in high school.
Winter – events of FF #1.
(Hank Pym in the Ant-Hill) (The Hulk)
Spring (March-April) – Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man [Aug 62]
intro Thor
debut Ant-Man

YEAR TWO [1961-1962] (PP HS-JunY)
debut Wasp
Intro. Dr. Strange

YEAR THREE [1962-1963](PP HS-SenY):
Sept. – PP is a senior in high school.
Sept. – The Avengers form.
Oct. – The X-Men go public. [Sep 63]
November – Ant-Man becomes Giant Man.
mid-Dec. – The Black Widow first appears.
March – Iron Man fights Hawkeye and Black Widow.
May – Reed and Sue engaged. Johnny and Ben almost meet the Beatles.
June – Hawkeye joins Avengers. PP and JS graduate High School. Quicksilver and SW join the Avengers. Reed and Sue marry. Nick Fury named director of SHIELD.
July – Galactus arrives. Sentinels. Quentin Quire is born. (this wasn't in Olshevsky!)

YEAR FOUR [1963-1964] (PP-CY-1):
Peter Parker’s freshman year of college.
Winter- Captain Mar-Vell arrives.
Feb. - Bobby Drake (Iceman) turns 18.
Late May-early June – 1: Lorna Dane
Summer. Franklin Richards born.

YEAR FIVE [1964-1965] (PP CY-2):
September. The Vision is created. Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne are married.
Late Sept-early Oct – 1: Sunfire
June-July: Hank McCoy goes to work for Brand Corp

YEAR SIX [1965-1966] (PP CY-3):
October – Beast gets furry.
May – GXM#1. The New X-Men

YEAR SIX [1966-1967] (PP CY-4):
Sept – Thunderbird dies.
Jan – Jean Grey replaced by Phoenix.

If Jean Grey was 24 when she is presumed to have died (based on the dates on her tombstone), and she is the same age as Peter Parker, then she must have died around 1968-69. This might jibe well with X-Men #101, which depicts snow in New York City on Christmas, something that has only happened 18 times since 1900, but did happen in 1966.

*Obviously the start date is speculative. Fantastic Four #1 was published in August of 1961 so the events must have occurred before that. 

An Old New Universe: A Comics Counterfactual

In another comic book counterfactual, I want to take a look at what might have been if Marvel's New Universe had been created in period where the Silver Age of comics was becoming the Bronze. Why? Well, I feel like there's a kernel of a good idea in some of the New Universe stuff but it's not always a good fit for the "world outside your window" concept. Just imagine...

Nightmask: A young adult gets the power to enter dreams through the actions of a villain that killed his parents. The high concept pitch for this is Spider-Man meets the 70s Sandman. Steve Ditko would be the ideal artist, but maybe Starlin takes over as it moves into the 70s.

Star Brand: Blue collar guy becomes a powerful superhero. Works well enough in a more standard superhero context. He'd need a different costume, though.

DP7: Another easy one. A little bit X-Men, a little bit Doom Patrol.

Kickers, Inc.: This title says Jack Kirby to me. Sort of if The Challengers of the Unknown were football pros. They need to fight monsters. Like, a lot of them. Probably still only gets a short run before cancellation.

Spitfire and the Troubleshooters: Jenny (called "Spitfire" due to her notorious temper) and her friends are a group of smart, prankster college students, who are forced to get serious when her inventor father is nearly killed by the bad buys. Donning his experimental suit of powered armor, Jenny (with the help of her friends) decides to bring them to justice. Its female lead and assemble cast would be an attempt to branch out beyond standard superheroics.

Justice: A knight from another dimension. The concept already pretty much fits the era, though the execution would be different. The name isn't great though.

Mark Hazzard: Merc: A bit less Commando and a bit more Sgt. Fury, Hazzard would be a "mercenary" like the A-Team, where he only takes on virtuous jobs. 

A Rough Planet of the Apes Chronology

I was talking with Jim Shelley of the Flashback Universe blog yesterday about the Planet of the Apes franchise (a not uncommon occurrence), and I suggested to him a way though prequel series from the 21st Century could be merged with the original series of films. Well, actually a couple of ways, but I'm only going to talk about one here.

The "original" timeline, is the story presented is definitively present in Rise of the Planet of the Apes through War for the Planet of the Apes. An experimental Alzheimer's drug inadvertently leads to an increase in simian intelligence and a super-flu. These events lead to conflict between humans and apes.

In the end, the apes have defeated their foes and migrated to an isolated place to build their city. Their leader, Caesar, first of the intelligence apes, dies.

Rise in passing mentions the Icarus spacecraft was lost, allowing for the possibly that it will return to earth at some point in the far future and events similar to Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes play out. Not identical perhaps, but similar.

Somehow, Cornelius, Zira, and Milo manage to go back in time as shown in Escape the Planet of the Apes to 1973. Much of what was depicted in this film would work exactly, as it posits an Icarus which had launched prior to '73, but a group of apes coming to Earth in an advanced spacecraft and revealing things about the future could. These events change to timeline.

This altered timeline ironically accelerates some events people were trying to avoid, leading to the events depicted in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes and limited nuclear war.

So there you go. Like I said, it's rough, but it works if you don't sweat every detail. For a much more detailed timeline (though not taking into account the newer films) check out Timeline of the Planet of the Apes by Rich Handley.

Spock Has A Twelth-Level Intellect

A perhaps silly idea I had back in 2017...

This is something I thought of the other day: certain parallels between comic book alien species and those in Star Trek. What's the use of it? I don't know. Trek with different aliens or different backstories for the aliens? Supers with Trek aliens? Some sort of Wold-Newton Space (Woldspace)? Make of it what you will.

Skrulls and the Founders/Changelings
The Founders are a shapeshifting race that runs an expansionist space empire and so are the Skrulls. DC's Durlans would fit the shapeshifting part, too. They've faced prejudice like the Changelings, but they don't run an empire.

Shi'ar and the Romulans
One species has a space empire with a bird motif and a sprinkling of Roman Empire terminology and the other is the Romulans. Sure, the Romulan Star Empire never seems as multi-species as the Shi'ar, but no reason it couldn't be. Might want to drop the link to Vulcan, though...

Coluans and Vulcans
Turning to DC comics for the Federation species, I'll note the somewhat emotionlessness and computer-like logic of the Vulcans and Brainiac's people, the Coluans.

The other other identifications I thought of, but some are too similar to add anything particularly interesting (The Khunds and the Klingons) and some distant enough to be suggest substitution (Thanagarians and Andorians. Thanagarians might stand-in for Romulans, too, depending on which version we're talking about) but you get the idea.

Pulp Sci-Fi Technology

Star Wars (and to a lesser extent Star Trek) are products of their respective eras in regard to the futuristic technology then portray (or don't feature), but both are also probably beholden to their pulp antecedents and the imagine (and failures of imagination) of the authors that wrote them.

While I won't claim to have made an exhaustive study, here are some things I've noticed about the technology of the retro-future, supplemented by things noticed by Marcus L. Rowland in his excellent Forgotten Futures rpg Planets of Peril based on the works of Stanley Weinbaum, and by GURPS Ultratech 2.

• Radium: Radium seems almost sort of unobtanium in a lot of old stories, an is imbued with uses and properties it doesn't really possess in real life. This goes along with...
• Radiation: Various sorts of radiation (or even sometimes a vaguer property called "vibration" of matter or energy) can do almost magical things. This continues in science fiction, of course, but by the Atomic Age the language used to describe it much less mystical.
• Mechanical not Electronic: One can hardly fault writers of the 20s-40s for not including many (or often any) computers in their works, beyond the occasional mechanical brain, but it's interesting how even the electrical devices appear sparingly, outside of things like visiplates/visiphones (visual communication devices). Some more planetary romance leaning authors like Leigh Brackett, tend to describe virtually none of this sort of technology. This has implications we might not think of: Edmond Hamilton's stories for instance have no jail cells with coded keypads or even simply push button keypads like Star Trek. All his futuristic locks seem to require a hand held "vibratory key."
• Planet and ship based: Artificial satellites and space stations are very rare. In fact, I don't think I've read a story written before the 50s that had them.
• Acquired not Synthesized: Many more breakthrough materials or pharmaceuticals are harvested from alien worlds that made in the laboratory. Even breakthrough laboratory discovers often require some exotic "natural" material.
• Solitary Inventor: Great scientific leaps from space travel to super-weapons are typically the province of single geniuses or experimenters, not teams of government or industry-funded scientists. First space travel is almost always mentioned as a work of a sort of Wright Brothers instead of a NASA.
• Atomic Energy: Everything is atomic powered it seems like.
• No TV: I'm sure there are stories that make reference to something like television as an entertainment medium, but it appears in very few stories. 

Constraints & Creativity

Occasionally, after I do a post on science fiction limited only to the Solar System or single country settings or the like, I get somebody commenting that seems too small or too limiting a space for them. In a similar vein, I feel like settings or games that provide a lot of options for PCs are lauded whereas limiting options for characters is viewed in a negative light.

People are free to like what they like, of course, but I don't agree with these complaints for the most part. Every setting or game excludes as many things (or more) as it includes in how it defines itself. Even kitchen sink or gonzo settings have parameters and boundaries. Game systems themselves constrain with their rules. 

There is obviously some give and take here. A GM who wants to run a D&D setting with more than the usual restrictions on options should communicate that and probably the reasons for it before hand, but armed with that knowledge, players ought to trying to make up characters that would fit the setting and negotiating with the GM regarding parameters. Honestly, I feel like I've had just as much fun playing a well-defined pregen than making up my own character, at least for short-run games.

I'm hardly the first to note this, but it seems to me constraint can stimulate creativity. It's true on the player side, but I think it's also true on the GM/setting creation side. With an large number of worlds to play with, it should be a trivial matter coming up with interesting planets, but the Star Wars franchise seems to have a tough time showing us anything but the same three or four biomes over and over. And most of those are are one biome: deserts, but perhaps that's a different problem. I don't think Star Wars is the only franchise that lets quantity substitute for quality. It's easy to do.

But If you've got a smaller number of worlds like a solar system, you've got to make every one count, and you might well use each one to it's fullest. Maybe they aren't all single biome planets, but even if they are, you would tend to have them have different sorts of jungle or different sorts of deserts to get the most out of it. All of that is creativity you would never have been forced to exercise if you had a bunch of planets to spare.

Maybe its just me. Try it for yourself, by self-imposing some constraints you wouldn't normal give yourself in worldbuilding or adventure design and see how it turns out.

Blake's 7

 

Something we read online last week prompted a brief discussion on Discord regarding the British science fiction series Blake's 7 (1978-1981). The show involves a political dissident (the titular Blake) leading a small group of escaped prisoners turned rebels (the titular 7) against the forces of the totalitarian Terran Federation. I don't know anything much more about the setting or how the plot plays out than that, having only seen the first episode years ago on PBS, but I think the concept has plenty of rpg potential.

There's nothing wrong with the set-up as is with the serial numbers filed off. The comic book series Six From Sirius would be another potential inspiration for this sort of thing--both in plot elements and characters and in 80s sci-fi trappings. I can think of a couple of ways the idea might be tweaked, though.

The first (possibly predictably, since I've done this before) is strip away some of the space opera conventions and have it confined to the solar system with more realistic tech. This becomes a little bit more cyberpunk, I think. It would be darkly dystopian, certainly, but serious or satirical would be possible.

My other though is to retain the galactic scale, but not have the setting be so humanocentric. Borrowing a bit from Farscape, the escaped prisoners might be a motley, mostly alien crew.

Different Dark Suns 2

Back in 2014, I did a post on "Different Dark Suns." There I kept the dying earth desert as the essential element but changed other things about Athasian culture. But what if we just ditched the desert?

Green Hell, Dark Sun

Athas is dying, but not because it's drying up, but because it's been choked out by a dreadful fecundity. Torrid jungles have swallowed most of the former civilization. The roads between city states must be cut anew every few weeks. Metal armor and weapons quickly corrode and rust away. The jungle is not just alive, but hungry. With the dimmer sunlight, plants have been forced to become predatory. Athas more as some versions of Pulp Venus, Weinbaum's "Parasite Planet" being particular useful, perhaps.

Frozen Beneath A Dark Sun

The sun isn't just dark, but dim, and Athas is frozen in its final Ice Age. There are deserts, true, but deserts of trackless white. The sorcerer-kings' main drawn would be their ability to create magical warmth in the cities to keep people alive. We'd have to forego that Brom barbaric costuming...Well, maybe not if we believe Joe Jusko:

Elysian Fields Forever

The existence of Elysium is seen by many a planar theoretician as proof of a mulitversal law of equipose. The existence of Hades by this way of thinking requires an Elysium--or vice versa--for the sake of balance. While Hades leeches everything of meaning and embodies a sense of hopeless, Elysium is pervaded by a sense of contentment and quiet joy, absent from considerations of the past or future of the cosmos. It is the middle ground between the transcendence of self of the Holy Mountain and the pursuit of absolute freedom and sensate pleasure of Arborea.

The theriocephalic guardinals may appear fierce on other planes but in Elysium they are more gentle of mein. They are mostly content to observe, only occasionally engaging visitors in conversation. In general, there is less conversation in Elysium than elsewhere; people are content merely to be. 

To the sages and seekers of the Holy Mountain, the tranquil meadows and forests of Elysium are actually another trial. If one can forsake personal contentment in the name of restoring the Godhead and Unity, then one may be worthy to see the summit of the Mountain, though of course, this may take life times.

The waters of the streams and limpid pools of Elysium are veritable liquid balms to the soul. Small vials go for high prices on material worlds where they are employed as nostrums and curatives. In the lower planes, such liquid is even more potent, though its mere possession may cause something akin to an immune response from reality itself and bring unwanted attention upon the possessor.

Acquiring waters for resale isn't as easy as it might appear. Elysium resists. Not in any violent way, but its nature contrives to lull visitors into its calm and contentment. Previous goals may come to seem less worthwhile or completely useless.

The Gray Wasteland

While the existence of some planes are comprehensible based on the desires or allegiances of the beings living there, Hades, the Gray Wastes, presents a problem for planar philosophers. There are many theories, but most are some variant of the idea that the suffering of souls within the cosmos seeped into a reservoir or found its level. The existence of despair, in other words, created Hades. It is perhaps no accident that it exists in some metaphysical sense equidistance between the oppression of Hell and the malignant egotism of the Abyss.

The beings that willfully reside in the Gloom, both exploit and partake of despair. The devils hold the yugoloth were once a cadre of Hell, but deployment on the frontlines of the war with Chaos led to trauma. Their methods became first unsound and then alien. Devils will work with them to achieve goals, but hold them in disdain. 

Their primary value to Hell's high command is the process they have developed for extracting the essence of despair from souls of beings consigned to Hades. Over time, souls cease to fight against the pull of despair and are cover in gray dust or ash, like the victims of a volcanic disruption. Eventually their substance is wholly petrified to that of Hades, but before that point, there is a time where their souls are still somewhat fluid, yet tainted. The yugoloths tap the corpse and remove the fluid. It can be used to form the basis of an elixir that robs souls of their free will. The prospect of absolutely obedient masses greatly excites diabolic strategists, and they wish to study the substance to see if it can be produced elsewhere.

The Arborean Experience

One of the paradoxes of Chaos is that, whatever the pronouncements of it's Powers and Lords, it is defined by ideas they were only possible when a lack of Unity was manifest in the multiverse. Philosophers have noted that as with Mechanus, the Plane of Law Absolute, there are core paradigms or truths without which the planes of Chaos could not exist. It is the centrality of those truths that separates the border regions of Chaos from the more encompassing Chaos of Limbo.

Arborea is a plane built upon the ideal of sensate experience. Its inhabitants reject any notion that formlessness or nonbeing is equivalent with being, and they reject the shackles on experiences and individual freedom regarding them that Law would forge.

Arborea typically appears as a vast, archetypal forest. Within there are glades or small manors where in the revels take place. These are sometimes open to the view of passersby, sometimes not, and they may be larger internally than they appear; effectively they are subrealms of the plane. Dramas of love, intrigue, daring, and violence, play out within these alcoves, but only among the likeminded who have chosen those experiences. The games are impermanent; diversions lead to no lasting harm, and may be replayed again and again, or abandoned and others taken up instead.

The only crime in Arborea is coercion or the abrogation of choice (unless a participant's choice was to have limited abridgement of choice). Violators of this rule who don't heed a warning are given over to the caprice of the eldarin, who devise a lesson of some sort--which like all the pleasures of Arborea, is not permanent. Habitual violators are barred from the plane.

The Devils are angered by the very existence of Arborea. Its uncoupling of actions from consequences, and the general frivolity and indolence of its inhabitants, make it an frequently cited example of what the cosmos would be like if Chaos got it's way.

Cowboy Bebop and the Faithful Adaptation

I've watched one episode of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop. so I could be wrong, but I think I already see how this is going to be. I don't think it's awful, but there are definitely things I'm not fond out.

Watching it brought to mind Rodriguez's first Sin City film. That film is a pretty faithful adaptation of the comic, down to the composition of shots, but my reaction on first viewing was very different from my reaction to the comic. It felt silly; I was vaguely embarrassed by it. It's not that I missed that Sin City the comic is over-the-top in some ways, and part of that over-the-topness is Miller's dialogue and narration. But when I read it, I get to decide how the characters deliver the lines, and the almost superhero comic level action scenes are just Millerisms to be translated to real world terms. (Much in the same way I know when reading a comic that characters don't have time for long discussion while they trade a couple of lightning quick blows. It's mere convention of the form, not something to be taken literally.) But on the screen their were actors not selling the clunky lines they were saying and all the action was taken all too literally.

Cowboy Bebop came from a cartoon not a comic so it's closer to film, but it's also the product of another culture (and honestly, another era) so maybe that all washes out. The show gets the details right in cosplay sort of way, but it doesn't feel the same. Gone is grubby future and much of the range in tone. The action is similar in prosaic description but what seemed dynamic in the anime feels fairly flat here. It may be less wacky than the cartoon, but then my tolerance for wacky is much less in live action.

Perhaps the biggest disappoint is some of the choices they made. The first episodes of the anime and the live action show have the same basic plot, but are otherwise fairly different. The anime opens with Spike's dream (enigmatic at that point) then goes into spare scenes of the solitary, early morning rituals of Spike and Jet, accompanied by blues harmonica. There is a lonesome feel to this sequence, and there is nothing like it in the live action show, which instead opens with quipy action. The cartoon returns to a bit of this somberness later with Spike's discussion with Katerina. This is also quite different in the live action episode. The show perhaps gets Bebop's silliness right, but misses the anime's mix of tones, except as absolutely requisite to the plot, and then it can't quite land it.

There's also the indication that we will be seeing hints of the Vicious-Spike conflict every single episode. This is no doubt to make a "season arc" fit for a modern streaming show. Cowboy Bebop the anime was structured like old school tv, with "stories of the week." Over-exposing Spike's arc robs it of any sense of slow reveal or discovery and has the potential to make everything else feel secondary.

Anyway, I'll keep watching. The wife likes it, and I've still got the animated series to watch when I want.

Everyone Comes to Sigil

I've said before that Sigil is perhaps the most interesting thing about Planescape, and it doesn't really rely on the Great Wheel for the things about it that are interesting. For most people, who seem the dislike the Great Wheel, that may be a design feature. I happen to like the Great Wheel (As a concept. I can't say I'm particularly excited by a lot of the execution. On the other hand, I also feel like a lot of the "what do you do with this?" response to it shows a willful lack of creativity. That's perhaps a topic for another post.) so I think a setting meant to make the classic planes of D&D a setting, but instead makes a setting that can mostly ignore them, has some flaws in execution.

We are told gods can't enter Sigil. This is very convenient, because it provides a base of operations very much like the Prime Material Plane (where gods can go, but don't much) for the PCs to run around in. It also raises a lot of metaphysical questions, which sure, might have interesting answers, but I feel like it would be just as interesting--maybe more--not to keep the gods out. Sigil is the center of a plane surrounded by all these hostile forces. It's a Neutral Zone, a DMZ, a Free City with no allegiance to any of those eternally warring philosophies. 

It would be a good place for the gods to come together to make treaties and talk, but also maybe a good place for them to vacation and let their hair down. What happens in Sigil, stays in Sigil. I'm thinking it should be a bit like the bathhouse in Spirited Away, a bit like Cold War Berlin, Throne from Kill Six Billion Demons, and Yu-Shan from Exalted. (Yu-Shan being the capital of Heaven has more bureaucracy than Sigil would have, certainly, but I mean in terms of a place crawling with spiritual powes minor and major.)

I think this would make Sigil more colorful perhaps, as part of the thing the PCs must navigate is avoiding offending visiting dignitaries. Of course, they have more room to be daring and burn the gods in some scheme or confidence game in Sigil, as the gods are constrained in what they can do within the city. Even still, it would be a risky play, but perhaps a tempting one. It would also supply a ready supply of quest-givers or dubious patrons.