Swords (and Spells) Against

Paul Wolfe of Mystic Bull Games is starting up a Sword & Sorcery fiction magazine called Swords Against! The first issue is being crowdfunded now. It features stories by familiar names including Michael Stackpole and Dariel R. A. Quiogue, and interior art by Jason Sholtis (presumably among others).

If that alone isn't enough to convince to you, Jason and I have short comic that will appear in the issue now that that stretch goal has been surpassed. It's called Spells Against Civility. Here's the pitch:

Harken to this tale of two rival wizards, apprenticed together, now alike in Art, pettiness, and vainglory...

Marzomon, once the Golden, former hero whose reputation fell under shadow of cowardice and party abandonment. He now ekes out a living trading on his former glories and hawking dubious male enhancement magics.

Hokus the Black, who sold his soul and other vital constituencies piecemeal to various diabolic entities and must stay ahead of his creditors as he seeks to overcome his rival. 

If any of the above sounds cool to you--and particularly if all of it does--then head over to backerkit and give some support!

Questing at Home

This weekend, I set up a sort of escape room/LARP for my 8 year-old. She took on the role of a warrior princess sent to retrieve a golden treasure (a plastic version of the idol at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark) from a many-armed monster (my old Clash of the Titans kraken toy, rescued and restored when my parents moved a couple of years ago).

With sword and shield, and a bag with a couple of coins (a KS reward from Outgunned Adventure) she set out to go to the wizard's tower (the upstairs of our home) where she had been told that a wizard had imprisoned a unicorn (a statue of the Last Unicorn from movie located on a bookshelf in her bedroom).

The quest involved the occasional puzzle (a tic-tac-toe cypher, a coordinate grid puzzle, riddle answering, and some light math) combined with random encounters. These were strategically placed pairs of cups, one of which had a monster (a cardboard mini) under it and the other either a coin or a friendly encounter that provided clues. For example, a gnome Meeple revealed that the Lime Gnome (a green garden gnome statue that for some reason sits in our dining room) runs an apothecary shop that will sell you a potion that gives a power up.

Monster fights were handled with simple dice rolls of a d6. Scoring a hit required beating the monster's roll by a certain amount, and monsters had a certain number of "hit points." My daughter had her own "life points" in the form of three hearts on sheets of paper clipped together.

As it turned out, my daughter was very luck. She only fought one monster before the boss and out rolled the monster every single time.

She enjoyed it and immediately asked for another one, but I said that would have to wait for another day.

Weird Revisited: Down in Troglopolis

As I was working on the Land of Azurth comic story (with art by Mike Kazaleh), I got to the page which gives a bit of an introduction to Subazurth. It reminded me of this post from 2014 where the region was introduced...

   

The vast system of caverns and passages that riddle the underground of the Land of Azurth are a realm unto themselves, known as Subazurth. Parts of Subazurth are wild and dangerous and in the hands or claws of monsters of various sorts, but other areas are quite civilized and organized into petty kingdoms and even cities. The greatest of these is Troglopolis.

 Troglopolis is a large city, perhaps not so grand as the Sapphire City of Azurth but hardly unimpressive. Most of its inhabitants are pale, large-eyed humans called Underfolk. They busy themselves with the same sorts of tasks that occupy those on the surface: they cultivate mushrooms and lichens, fish underground lakes, mine metals, raise bats and train them to carry messages, drain goblinic slime pools for public safety, and engage in commerce--some of this with the surface world.

The practice of religion is found amongst them, as well, of course. They know of Azulina and her handmaidens, but they also venerate relics they find in their caves. These anomalous items do not seem to have come from Azurth above--in fact, they sometimes seem of more advanced manufacture. The Troglopolitans view these as gifts from the gods.

A page from the Azurth comic, highlighting some dangers of Subazurth

Humans aren't the only inhabitants of Troglopolis and the civilized regions. There are little folk like in the world above, though there are some varieties not found in Azurth proper. The troglings (or troggles) are furred and tailed humanoids who typically live rather shiftless lives amid ancient ruins of a pre-human civilization.

There are also the diminutive but industrious deep gnomes (sometimes called red gnomes, for the color of their caps). They enlarge passageways to standard sizes, shore up caves, decorate areas with blocky, angular sculptures, and even cultivate the grow of crystalline rock candy outcroppings that so many creatures use for sustenance. It is quite likely that a great under-city like Troglopolis would not be possible but for their efforts. Deep Gnomes are collectivist, owning everything in common and valuing the public good above all. Other species are sometime derisive of them, even destroying the gnomes’ work when it suites them, but the deep gnomes seem oblivious to such affronts, wholly content in their labor.

The Runaway Shadow

 We had a couple of players out, so we postponed our Land of Azurth 5e game until next week. So instead of gaming, I got a chance to work on the Land of Azurth comic story starring Waylon the Frogling called "The Runaway Shadow." This was originally planned for Underground Comics #2, but that hasn't happened unfortunately. Also, Jeff Call, the original artist, got a new job in animation in California and moved before being able to complete the story back in 2018. I did get this page out of it, and it was great. Lettering here, by me:

The project was shelved for a few years, but then I picked it back up in in 2021, at least enough to commission comics artist Mike Kazaleh to draw the whole thing. I told Mike I was looking for a bit of Harvey Comics vibe, without being a pastiche, and he did a great job. Here's the the first page, again lettered by me:

I started coloring it last night, using digital halftone brushes to mimic old school comic's coloring, but I'm not done with that yet.

A Few More Words from the Wyvern's Prophet

Work in progress from Jason

While we're awaiting the technically still awaiting the announcement of the winners of the Appx. N Jam, I've been thinking about what's next for my project. Specifically, I'd like to do an expanded to include things I just could fit into 4 pages.

This will include things like more GM guidance for how to run the factions, particularly once their "balance" has been disrupted by the PCs arrival, and some additional encounters including a chance to visit the accumulator core of the installation and learn the strange fate of Dhu Rojat, former keeper.

Best of all though, it means more art from Jason Sholtis.

This won't be massive expansion. It's still intended to be a minor adventure. A side encounter in a hexcrawl, perhaps. Hopefully, though, this version will improve upon the basic concept. I'm probably bring it to drivethru as a pay what you want.

Cover Design

 I have been recently thinking about adding a page on the blog with a complete listing of my rpg related works including both things I have written and things for which I did some graphic design. Easily, some of my best collaborations in this regard have been with Jason Sholtis.

I'm particularly proud of the alternate covers I did for Completely Unfathomable, though I wasn't directly involved with the final decisions and preparation for print, and with the rush to get the project over the finishline, they maybe didn't turn out as well as they might have.

The one that was used for the final cover was this one with refer to as the "blacklight cover." It isn't blacklight, really, but I colored Jason's art in that garish sort of way to look like it might be.

Originally, we had designed it to use the logo I had made for the original Operation Unfathomable, but on seeing the final mockup Jason was gracious enough to let me quickly do another one I thought would fit the image better.

I had originally designed other covers for the various editions of the book, in the end I believe they just went with the one and the others were just given as extras? Anyway, my favorite of all of them was the faux bubble card wrapper cover:

Recently, Jason and I collaborated again on a cover for my Appx. N Jam submission. He held off his usual grayscale shading to make it easier for me to color. I added some texture in the background I hoped support his great image. The logo hand-drawn (or handconstructed digitally really) based on the title text of the Ace Double edition of People of the Lens by Leigh Brackett was actually the first thing done. Jason and I worked out the cover layout in discussion and then he drew the image.

Appx. N Jam and Prophet of the Wyvern's Word

My submission for the Appx. N Jam went live on itch today. You can check it out there with all of the other cool entries.

The 4-page maximum page count (including cover) was brutal. I may do an expanded version and put it on drivethrurpg later. 

The Prophet of the Wyvern's Word Cover

 I previously mentioned the Appx. N Jam and the submission I had planned. Well, the month is nearing its end, and I'm not done (though I'm getting close!) and I do have a cover to show off finally, so that even if I don't make the jam, the adventure will probably come out.

Here's the final piece as an aged paperback featuring an illustration by the inestimable Jason Sholtis:

Prophet of the Wyvern's Word

Though the deadline's are tight, I thought it would be fun to join the Appx. N Jam over on itch. The challenge is to create an adventure homaging the style of the pulpier fiction of the fantastic of Appendix N. Your given a title and you have to work with that to create your short adventure.

I got "Prophet of the Wyvern's Word," for which I think I'll take inspiration primarily from one of my favorite's: Leigh Brackett, as well of a lot of general pulp fiction ambience. It will be a challenge getting everything done in the time less than 25 days remaining, but since it has to be 4 pages of less, I figured it was worth a shot.

Above is my work on a banner. I based it on the hand drawn title text of the Ace Double of People of the Talisman from 1964.

RPG Crowdfunding to Check Out

 Time for some plugs for rpg projects by friends of mine I think you ought to check out.

Luka Rejec's Our Golden Age: An Ultraviolet Grasslands rpg has taken off big time, so you are probably already aware of this one, but just in case, you should follow the link and cast you eyes upon its goodness!

Chris Vermeren has been toiling away for a while now on a cool cyberpunk rpg, Terminal State. I've been privileged to see the teases he's been dropping on Discord, and think if it's a genre you dig you won't want to miss this one when it launches. Be there in the beginning for the street cred! You can download the Quickstart free, too.

Operation Unfathomable Covers

 Jason Sholtis tells me that the work on the remaining Operational Unfathomable Kickstarter items is drawing to close, which is good news to a lot of people. Jason requested I send him all of the cover designs I had brainstormed for the various products. I had not looked at any of these in 4 or 5 years, but once I dug them up and thought they were worth sharing, though none of them may get used on the actually products.

This was my first design for the Completely Unfathomable omnibus. I mainly just wanted to give it an omnibus sort of feel.

This is for the same book, but thinking a bit more out of the box. It's meant to look like an old bubblegum card wax pack wrapper. 

This is the is the second design I did for Odious Uplands. It's meant the reference the sort of WPA national park posters. 

This was my proposal for the DCC version of Completely Unfathomable. It references the Skywald Publishing horror magazine style (even with a riff on it's "horror mood" tagline). It's my least favorite of these.

Ootherion Logos

 Jason Sholtis is working a comic set in the world Operation Unfathomable called Ootherion: Ape Myrmidon. He asked me to come up for a logo for the comic. I did several iterations, not because Jason is demanding but because I wasn't satisfied. Here are the last two I did:

I don't know which will appear on the comic, but I'm relatively satisfied with both of these.

Heroic Headshots!

I've been busy with real-life stuff, projects have been backburnered for a bit now, but looking back over art done for the Armchair Planet Who's Who I've posted to the blog before makes me eager to get back to it. Just take a look at these team headshots done by Agus Calcagno:

Branded as anomalies--beings who were dangerous simply because they were outside their proper timestream--they were imprisoned in an extra-temporal prison. They escaped and now survive as crosstime soldiers of fortune... The Tempus Fugitives!

They are the source of our legends of fairies, trolls, and goblins, but the truth is they are a genetically altered subspecies of humanity with incredible powers. They are the Abhumans, and they have remained hidden...until now!

Zarthoon

In moments stolen from other projects (or day jobs), Jason Sholtis and I have been bandying about ideas for a Sword & Planet setting for some future publication. It's still taking form, but here are some facts about Zarthoon as we currently know them:

• It is a planet orbiting a G-type star, 66 G. Centauri, some 30 light-years from Earth. It is about one and a half times larger than Earth, but is less dense, so it has a similar gravity. It has one moon, but also a glittering band of dust, where perhaps another moon once orbited.
• Some people of Earth have come to Zarthoon in the past, by mysterious means. Indeed, the primary intelligent species seems to identical to Terran humanity in all respects.
• There was a nuclear war centuries ago. Zarthoon's advanced civilization was mostly destroyed, only ruins remain of once advanced cities on most continents, though there are a few cities, including the domed city of Azmaron, which hold on to a bit of their former glory. In most places it is a "points of light" setting where city-states are isolated and surrounded by monster and mutant-infested wilderness.
• Much of Zarthoonian technology is based around the radioactive mineral called zuranite. Its radiation is focused to provide beam weapons of deadly force, used to power the buckler-like hand-shields that are the only protection against those beams, and to power the anti-gravity engines of fliers.
• Most disputes aren't settled with zuranite ray guns, but instead with swords, graceful rapiers edged with crystalline adamant so that no metal armor can resist them.
• Not everyone has access to fliers and so many rely on beasts of burden, including the swift, flightless avian zurch, and the beaked and elephantine vastidars.

Size comparison of a vastidar and a human

Wednesday Comics: The Runaway Shadow

Though it's been slower going than we would have liked, the second issue of Underground Comics is still one it's way. Here's a a newly lettered page from the Land of Azurth story "The Runaway Shadow" featuring Wayon the Frogling drawn by Jeff Call:

The Tempus Fugitives

The Armchair Planet Who's Who will contain some "minor" characters/teams who are presented with not more explanation than is what in their entry. This is part of the suggestion of a bigger universe rather than exhaustively detailing it all. The Tempus Fugitives are one of those...

They were branded "anomalies"--beings who were dangerous simply because they were outside their proper timestream: Gary Mitchum, taken from a 1950s Earth by a flying saucer crew from an erased future; Ssatheena the Dinosorceress from an Earth of evolved saurian swords and sorcery; Jack "Tex Mech" McCandless, a cyborg cowpoke from a high-tech Old West; Jehana Sun, warrior maiden of a future medieval Earth conquered by aliens; M'Gogg, a hulking Neo-anderthal from a post-nuclear war world. They promptly escaped from the "Big Hypercube" maximum security prison and now survive as temporal soliders of fortune.

Art by Agus Calcagno

Armchair Planet Who's Who Update

Art by Agus Calcagno

There's been a bit of a lull in the posting on the Armchair Planet Who's Who superhero supplement, but work proceeds. Here are a couple of new pieces of art to prove it! Since designer's notes seem to be the new hip thing (at least according to G+ discussion), I wanted to say a bit about my approach to the writing of it, beyond the game stats side of things.

Like Strange Stars, the Who's Who is meant to suggest a world rather than completely describe it. Unlike Strange Stars, it does it almost entirely through characters, and specifically the presentation of character like the DC Who's Who or similar to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. This means there might be more detail on a given character (maybe) than you need at the table, but you can always flip the page and go straight to the game stats. Or, you can read the text and get hints of the superhero universe the characters inhabit, and perhaps a sort of meta view of the different "ages" f the fictional comic book company that published them. (We won't dwell on the hypothetical Armchair Planet Comics. The only textual appearance of it will be in the "first appearances" of characters, which can be easily ignored if you find such conceits too precious.)

So you might read about the Abhumans making their home in an abandoned city of the ancient Hyperboreans or learn that Thunderhawk once teamed up with those motorcycle-riding, crimefighting ladies, the Avenging Angels, but you won't find entries for either Avenging Angels or Hyperboreans, or for the teen-humor-comic-refugee band, The Tomorrows, that Futura shares a house with. Context will hopefully be enough to get your creative juices flowing and you don't need me over-specifying homages to various fictional entities you're already aware of. If your version is substantially different than the one I came up with, well that's just fine.

Also, the characters themselves, while all fitting a late Bronze Age DC mold have hints of the eras they were likely "born" in built into them. Some have origins that clearly saw their earliest versions in the Golden Age (like Champion), while others (like Damselfly) show telltale signs of (multiple) later eras. My goal was less a consistent comics universe than a naturalistic one, though like any good handbook of the mid-80s, I've smoothed over the incongruities to make it look coherent. Which is to say, I wrote it like incongruities were being smoothed over.

As I write this, it all sounds a bit metatextual, but I don't think the finished product will require that level of engagement. Also, I feel like superhero role-playing is a genre that has always had a bit of metatextuality to it. If comics history easter eggs and homages can be put to use in springboarding the creation, well maybe, if used with restraint, they might serve a purpose.

Art by Chris Malgrain

Who's Who in the Armchair Planet Universe

I'm been posting a number of new superheroes of late with new artwork, and it's all related to a new rpg project, which is ultimately related to a comics project I'm doing with Jim Shelley and the artist Chris Malgrain. I'm sure I'll post more on that as things develop, but for now I want to talk about the rpg project.

Tentatively titled Who's Who in the Armchair Planet Universe, it is planned to be two "issues" featuring characters and things from the universe of the comic, members of the heroic Super-Sentinels and the villainous Masters of Menace. It will have DC Who's Who style "fluff" entries on each character and stats for the Icons rpg for each. Why Icons, well besides being a good system, it's OGL and it's stats are simple enough they seem relatively easy to translate to other systems (particularly TSR's Marvel Superheroes and its clones), so it will be fairly universal while still providing some stats.

Here's the draft of the statless front page of the Champion's entry:

More to be revealed!

Underground Comics is Here!

The wait is over! You can now purchase Underground Comics #1 at IndyPlanet in print and digital. Comixology digital is on the way if you prefer that format. (If you missed my previous talk about UC, check out this post.)

It's 36 pages by some great DIY rpg illustrators. Here are the preview pages that will (eventually) be on the IndyPlanet page:

It Came from the 80s

Well, actually it came from the mind and hand of Kreg Mosier, but it's about the 80s. Remember back when Unseelie Court fae were running rampant, and youthful, fae-touched cops were our best line of defense? You're probably just too young.

Anyway, I haven't read very far in it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.