Peacekeeping Mission to Mars

I was thinking about Leigh Brackett's Mars today (as I often do) and reflecting on how it isn't very science fictional at all, so that if you advanced the timeline of its colonial Mars about half a century to a century, you might get something that looks a bit like our modern world except with spaceships where Terran peacekeeping forces get bogged down in insurgencies or civil wars on Mars (or Venus).

With a set up like this, you could do the pulp Mars version of modern films set in conflict zones like Blackhawk Down or even better Three Kings. If you went with Earth in a sort of Cold War, you could even wind out with a Twilight:2000 sort of situation would troops lost on Mars and trying to figure out what to do next.

Going Beyond the Wall

 

A couple of weeks ago, my 5e gaming group agreed to give Beyond the Wall a try as a bit of a change of pace. While the setting is only defined in the broadest of strokes to give room to decide some things in play, it's the same setting as in the triads I presented here.

There was a bit of a learning curve. A couple of the players had either only ever played 5e or either hadn't played older D&D in a long time, and both rely on a virtual tabletop for running their characters, so had to discover or rediscover some terminology and how things fit together. That's a wrinkle that's worth considering when introducing players to a new game coming from 5e/Pathfinder: The new game may be less complicated in an absolute sense, but if they can't lean on a VTT, that might not help in getting the game up and running.

Anyway, once we got into the group character creation and associated village (and environs) creation everybody got into the spirit and enjoyed it. One player remarked it was the most fun that she had had in character creation. I gave them their pick of the playbacks in the original book and several supplements. In retrospect, I might have limited them a bit more or modified them slightly if I had thought to do so, but it will work out, I'm sure.

I did not follow BTW's advice and rush to complete chargen and play an adventure in one setting. I know that's meant to be one of the primary points of the game, but it's an advantage not really needed with our group, and we had a player out, so no reason to leave him behind.

Ozoom Revisited

Scott Martin can be blamed for this post for pointing out the similarities between Oz and Edgar Rice Burroughs fandom....

Mars is dying and has been for millennia. The only truly fertile land left is the squarish Land of Oz, surrounded on all side by deadly desert.

Oz has four countries, each home to a different race of men. The east is the home of the Blue Men, short in stature and friendly. It was once under the tyrannical rule of an ancient crone, but she was felled by a little girl from Earth. In the South is the Country of the Red Men, ruled by a benevolent queen. In the west are the Yellow Men, who are renowned for their technological skill. They are ruled by a metal man. The northern country is the land of the Purple Men. They've been ruled by a succession of queens, each with a mastery of the powers of the mind.

In the center of Oz is the Emerald City-State, and it's lofty spires and magnificent domes are made entirely of crystal. Their true color is in a part of the spectrum neither human nor Martian eyes can perceive, but the city's people wear optics which convert the color to green. It was formerly ruled by a man of Earth, a charlatan and huckster, but the rightful queen has been restored, after having spent her youth in exile, disguised as a boy.

Young Dorothy Gale was transported to Mars by a strange storm that tossed her, along with her dog and her home across the astral void. She killed a witch, exposed a charlatan, and helped restore the rightful ruler of Oz. She didn't do it alone. She was aided by a Lion Man, exiled for his supposed cowardice, an artificial man without the ancient brain that formerly guided him, and a Yellow Man whose mind was had been placed in a metal body. The companions took the Golden Road that followed the ancient canals that terminated in the great Emerald City, then undertook a quest to depose the witch that ruled the Yellow Men and who forced them to use their knowledge to build her an army of conquest.

This was only the first on many trips Dorothy Gale made to Mars. That young farm girl became a dying world's greatest hero.

The original version of this post appeared in 2018.

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.

The Case for Planetary Romance

Richard Hescox

I feel like planetary romance (sometimes called Sword & Planet, though I think that might be better thought as a subgenre or sub-subgenre) is, I think, a genre well-suited for rpg exploitation, but despite this utility is oddly under-represented. Sure, a search for "sword & planet" or "planetary romance" on drivethru turns up a few pages of entries, but many of those are only sort of "planetary romance informed" (like Dark Sun) or really other genres (like Old Solar system space opera). 

Genre boundaries are admittedly, fuzzy things, so I suppose I should first define what I mean. Planetary romance is a genre about exploration of the biospheres, societies, and cultures of an alien world. Typically, the exploration of the world doesn't just entail the usual activities of naturalists or explorers, but additionally the uncovering of a mystery or mysteries. Planetary romance worlds are more than they appear. The protagonist of these stories is most often an outsider like the reader because that gives the author the greatest freedom into working details about the setting into the narrative. Since a singular world and its exploration is essential to the genre, world-hopping works may share stylistic similarities to planetary romance, but I don't think they belong in the genre--though one could have a planetary romance series where every installment was a different world. Works with a non-outsider protagonist might likewise be excluded*, otherwise some secondary world fantasies would be up for inclusion, though mostly I'd exclude those for their settings being too Earth-like. Lord Valentine's Castle, I'd say, one could call a Planetary Romance and has no outsider protagonist, but it has an amnesiac one, which serves the same purpose.

Sword & Planet, I think, is a subtype of planetary romance, where the planet being visited is (mostly) less technologically advanced (at least in surface ways), and the plots mostly involve action. That action typically resembles swashbuckling fantasy or Sword & Sorcery fiction. The exemplar and progenitor of this type is Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. Swords and sci-fi (like Star Wars or any pulp era space opera stories) have anachronist/inconsistent tech like Sword & Planet but lack the focus on a single world.

Anyway, definitions aside, why do I think it's a good genre for games, perhaps particularly those of an old schoolish bent? Well, the focus on exploration for one thing. Planetary romance easily fits a hexcrawl or pointcrawl model. Planetary romances like Vance's Tschai/Planet of Adventure series or the Alex Raymond years of the Flash Gordon comic strip involve covering a lot of ground and uncovering new things.

Panel from Flash Gordon comic strip by Dan Schkade

Secondly, while actual dungeons are perhaps few (the Cave World of Kira from Flash Gordon not withstanding), ruins to explore are quite common. A number of dead cities, for instance, turn up in Burroughs' John Carter series.

Third, there is an element at least close to picaresque in a lot of planetary romance. While the protagonists aren't typically rogues or anti-heroes, their adventures are episodic and involve navigating or outsmarting corrupt or stultified social systems. Money and food are concerns, depending on the story, and the protagonists often have to get menial sorts of jobs or get imprisoned for petty offenses. Don Lawrence's Storm, for example, is more than once forced into some sort of labor for basically not knowing local customs.

Don Lawrence

So, given what I've said, why isn't Planetary Romance more popular? Mainly, I think it's because there hasn't been a recent example that reached a wide audience. Burroughs' work seems old fashion (as the failure of the recent film perhaps shows) and newer examples (like Scavengers Reign) tend to position themselves more firmly in science fiction than as something that sort of mixes fantasy and sci-fi.

*There are certainly books in planetary romance series that have native protagonist (books in both Burroughs' Mars series and Akers' Kregen series come to mind), but these notably occur after several books with outsider protagonists to get things established, so I think my point still stands.

What it's Like to Travel The Stars

Presumably no one on Earth has yet experienced interplanetary space travel. When the creators of space travel-related media go to describe it or evoke the feeling of it for their audience they tend to analogize it in terms of some idiom of travel their audience is familiar with. The ways in which travelers interact with travel, the stylings of ships and controls, and the attitude of the world toward pilots--all of these things are typically informed more by the specific analogy employed that the speculative mechanics of the travel.

For example, the most pervasive of these is likely space travel as sea travel. This occurs at the level of language where we usually talk of "spaceships" instead of craft or vehicles and crew rankings/positions typically follow naval models. This analogy is evident in Star Trek in its naval organization and the conduct of its space battles, but also in the particular romanticization of both vessels, voyaging, and at times, captaincy. In Star Trek V, Kirk quotes the 1902 poem "Sea-Fever" by Masefield: "All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer by," and it's not at all out of place with the vibe.

Star Wars engages in the sea travel analogy, too. It and its imitators like Battlestar Galactica have capital ships acting as aircraft carriers. The Millenium Falcon is a tramp freighter with a captain supposedly inspired by Humphrey Bogart's screen persona (and perhaps his famous role as a tramp steamer captain in The African Queen (1951)). His adventures with Chewbacca prior to Star Wars probably look a lot like episodes of the radio series Voyage of the Scarlet Queen just translated from the South Seas to the Rim. Cowboy Bebop really hits you over the head with the tramp sea vessel analogy by having the Bebop land in water and being built from a sea-going vessel.

Star Wars likes to mix things up, though. It also employs the second most common analogy: space travel as air travel. Dogfights between fighters have moves out of World War II and hotshot pilots are almost as important to the narrative as they are in Top Gun. The cockpit controls of the Millennium Falcon, and the fact "she doesn't look like much" but "she's got it where it counts" could easily be the way a cargo pilot in some pulp adventure describes his aging sea plane, as in Tales of the Gold Monkey (or more accurately, the sort of fiction that inspired it) or the cargo planes in the early years of the Steve Canyon comic strip.

The third analogy that comes to mind is trucking. I define this as a focus on space travel as performed by rather unromanitic figures, blue collar-working stiffs, often solitary and with few amenities in their utilitarian-appearing vessels. It is not nearly as common as the other two, but it is specifically evoked in Alien and in Cowboy Bebop in the episode "Heavy Metal Queen." The farhaulers of the Transhuman Space setting also have some of this vibe. 

Are there other analogies? Probably. I think some media gestures toward spacecraft as automobile, often in a sort of plot where automobile itself is just the modern stand-in for the freedom of a "fast horse." Leigh Brackett has several protagonists on the run from the law in a fast, small ship like an outlaw escaping on horseback in a Western or a muscle car in a 70s car movie. Battle Beyond the Stars, the Star Wars-inspired space opera retread of the Magnificent Seven (and thus, Seven Samurai) has several of its "hired guns" traveling in solo spacecraft, and at least one is a cowboy. These are less convincing, though, because spacecraft tend to only analogize to cars or horses in media in limited ways. They always occur in "mixed metaphors."

And there are a lot of those of course, with Star Wars being the obvious example, as I said. Still, I find it interesting just how clear these analogies often are.

The Rpg Art of Kent Burles

 I first became aware of Canadian artist Kent Burles via his comic book work in The Adventurers, though I had seen it decades ago in Malibu's Planet of the Apes comics, too. Once I began to associate his style with his name, I connected him with a lot of rpg illustration from the past I had liked but hadn't known the artist. He did work in the 80s through the 00s in a lot of places: Iron Crown Enterprises, Steve Jackson Games, Palladium, and Green Ronin, among others.

Here are a couple of pieces that really showcase his design sensibility. I love the texture on both of these. It recalls for me the work of Stephen Fabian:

His elaboration of clothing decoration, armor, and technology is a bit like Jack Kirby but also strongly classic Sword and Sorcery:

This is just some of the stuff I could find online. Some of his most fantastical work I think is in the MERP Dol Guldur supplement. I don't know if it says "Tolkien," but it's got a strong S&S vibe and hints of Kirbytech, and it really sells the evil and deadly nature of the fortress. Anyway, I think his stuff is under-appreciated, which is unfortunately true of a number of rpg artists' work of the same era.

Triads

 Welsh triads, a historical form found in Medieval manuscripts where folkloric and mythologic tidbits are presented in groupings of three seem a compact way of delivering some light setting info. 

Playing with the form, I came up with a couple related to the setting I posted about here. 

Three terrible spectres of the Realm:
Pendhol,who seeks his lost crown and lost head in the hills of Hern,
And Llaithwyn, Lady of the Night Mists, who the wise give courtesy but only fools embrace,
And Black Gawl, the hound loosed by the Beast from the Outer Dark to herald the doom of Men.

Three cunning folk of the Realm:
Morgna, witch and shape-changer, whose hut wanders the Marshes of Morva,
Wyrthegern the Mad, who lives in the wild and speaks in riddles,
And the Wizard Midhryn of Many Names, who was judged most cunning of all.

Weird Revisited: The Moving Pointcrawl

The original version of this post appeared in July 2015. I never did finish writing In Doom's Wake, but it got playtested twice I believe. I really should get around to finishing it one of these days.

The pointcrawl, which abstracts a map to the important points, eliding the empty places/boring stuff a hexcrawl or similar complete mapping would give equal weight, is [in 2025 certainly!] a well-established concept. One unusual variation not yet explored [it wasn't in 2015, and still isn't, so far as I know!] is the crawling of moving points.

Admittedly, these would be pretty unusual situations--but unusual situations are the sort of stuff adventures are made from: Exploring a flotilla of ancient airships or the various "worlds" in a titan wizards orrery; Crawling the strange shantytown distributed over the backs of giant, migrating, terrapin. Flitting from tiny world to tiny world in a Little Prince-esque planetary system. Some of these sort of situations might stretch the definition of pointcrawl, admittedly, and to model some of them in any way accurately would require graphing or calculus, and likely both.

Let's take a simple case--something from an adventure I'm working on. Say the wrecks of several ships are trapped in a Sargasso Sea of sorts. The weed is stretchy to a degree, so the wrecks move to a degree with the movement of the ocean, but the never come completely apart.

The assumption (to make it a pointcrawl, rather than just a hexcrawl, where the points of interest move) is that there were pretty much only certain clearer channels a small boat could take through the weed--or maybe certain heavier areas that a person who wasn't too heavy could walk over without sinking in complete.

The map would look something like this:

Note that this map is pretty abstract, despite appearances. The distances or size of the weed patch aren't necessarily to scale with the derelict icons. Length of connecting lines is of course, indicative of relative travel distance. The colors indicate how "stretchy" an area is: blue can move d4, orange d6, and red d8 in feet? yards? tens of feet? Not sure yet. Anyway, whether this drift is closer or farther away would depend on a separate roll of 1d6 where odds equals farther and evens closer. Of course, they can't come any closer than the distance they are away on the map, so any "extra" distance would be a shift to one side or the other.

Zigzags denote a precarious patch, where there would be an increased risk of a sudden thickening (if I'm going with boat travel) or falling in (if I go with walking). Dots will denote an extra wandering monster or unusual event check.

So there are a lot of kinks to work out, but that's the basic idea.

The Ruin of Mogh's Fort

Mogh's fortress is a ruin. Pigs root in the courtyard and roam noisily in his empty halls or drowse in sunbeams beneath a decaying roof. Mogh's once great chair is little more than kindling, crushed and splintered by generations of stout boars have scratched bulk against it.

The commote, a backwater of Hern trithing since its petty lords yielded to Arrn, is mostly the domain of the pig herds, which are both bane and boon to small and scattered villages. A few old folk have the knack of apprehending the grunting, snorting porcine tongue, and the pigs affirm (or so they claim) what the elders already knew: it is wise to stay clear of the ruins of Mogh's fort, particularly after dark.

The bandit lord and his bloody-handed reavers are long gone, but Mogh's doom is said to have come by a curse, and the curse may yet linger. Sometimes, the elders say (and the pigs, too, perhaps) that not all nocturnal visitors to the fortress come on four hooves. There are those demon swine that may choose to go about on two. 

Dread Knights and Dead Lovers

Our Land of Azurth game continued last night, but I haven't written about the previous session, so this covers both. The party only had one more shard of the mirror to collect. A mirror that would free the soul of Nocturose, but if that was for good or ill they didn't know for sure.

The last shard was on an altar amid standing stones on an island within a stinking bog. A poisonous, stinking bog. If all that wasn't bad enough, it had a guardian, a spirit naga. She wasn't much of a match for the whole party, though, but Shade was poisoned by inhaling too much swamp gas.

With all the shards in hand, they returned to the tower. The door was locked, and when Erekose tried to force it, he was blasted by intense cold. Luckily, he's resistant to the elements so it was a minor inconvenience. Within the crumbling tower, they saw a mirror in need of repair and an empty thrown. The ghostly Nocturose asked them to repair the mirror to free her so that she could be reunited with her love, the Dark Queen Morthalia.

The characters surprisingly quickly given a number of potential warning signs, agreed to give it a try. As they did, Nocturose revealed she had left one thing out: there were Dread Knights who guarded the mirror. The wraiths materialized out of shadow and were all "have at thee!"

The fight was on! It was two against five, but the party beyond Erekose had a hard time hitting them. Waylon went down and Erekose was close, but Dagmar's healing kept them in the fight, and she managed to blind one of the knights. Eventually, the party prevailed.

The party repaired the mirror, and Nocturose's spirit appeared within to thank them before fading away to return to her body. The party tried to make a pitch for her convincing Morthalia to join the fight against the Wizard, but it's unclear she got the message.

When they returned to report their success, they found a crowd including their old friend, Commodore Cog, the steam-powered ship captain. The reunion was spoiled when he revealed the monarchs leading the rebellion--Viola, Desira, and Bellona--had somehow been turned to stone.

This adventure was a modified version of Kobold Press' Shadows of the Dusk Queen.

Further Thoughts on Magic

Thinking about my Monday post further (and reading more examples of magic in McKillip's Heir of Sea and Fire), I feel like the part that perhaps the most central element to number of these magic systems I like is that they demonstrate Frazer's concept of sympathetic magic.

Raderle can create a powerful illusion of large lake, by digging a fist-sized hole and pouring water into it. Arthur in The Revolutions can snap a chair leg by snapping the stem of a wine glass. These are both examples of similarity, or like producing like.

The other common employed aspect of sympathetic magic is contagion. It shows up quite a bit in The Revolutions, but I don't think I quoted an example. It's where an item that was once physically connected to someone or something else still has a magical connection to that thing. This is being able to cast a spell on someone because you have a lock of their hair or the like.

Similarity shows up some in D&D spell material components, but I think more of these are sort of jokey correspondences instead.  These things are fine and could even be flavorful for bigger spells or more complicated rituals, I think more spells that used a perhaps caster-specific but reasonable application of similarity and contagion. 

Magic Systems I Like: The Riddle-Master series

I wrote a post almost a year ago related to portrayals of magic in fiction I'd like to see magic in fantasy rpgs be more like. In reading Patricia McKillip's excellent Riddle-Master series, I've come across more examples that are perhaps even more adaptable to fantasy adventure rpgs than some of the ones I mentioned previously.

In McKillip's setting, there are wizards but they are hidden/in hiding at the beginning of the story. The examples I've given here reflect the things able to be done by talented individuals (explicitly not everyone is capable of learning them) but not by people who either have the highest aptitude or training.

She had left, in front of Rood's horse in the College stable, a small tangle of bright gold thread she had loosened from her cuff. Within the tangle, in her mind, she had placed her name and an image of Rood stepping on it, or his horse, and then riding without thought every curve and twist of thread through the streets of Caithnard until, reaching the end, he would blink free of the spell and find that neither the ship nor the tide had waited for him. 

- Heir of Sea and Fire

Raederle (the "she" above), is also able to use this same technique to trip someone immediately (like in a combat situation by throwing a tangle of thread or similar material in front of them. She also is noted to be able to make a thorn bush into (or perhaps seem to be) a difficult to traverse bramble and to find her way out of a magical forest that confounds visitors and gets them lost.

These abilities seem more like spells of the AD&D sort, though they are perhaps wider in application than many and certainly less flashy than most. Another commonly employed magical ability in the series is "the shout:"

...Rood caught his breath sharply and shouted.

Morgon dropped the crown. He put his face against his knees, his hands over his ears. The wine glass on the desk snapped; the flagon on a tiny table shattered, spilling wine onto the stones. The iron lock on a massive book sprang open; the chamber door slammed shut with a boom.

- The Riddle-Master of Hed

More magical powerful individuals can generate more powerful shouts, even to the point we are told of laying low armies in rare instances. We are told that individuals able to shout are only able to do so at times of intense emotion, so it isn't exactly an "at will" power. Still, fairly D&D spell-like.

It's interesting to me how, in broad strokes, the magic conforms to Isaac Bonewits concept in Authentic Thaumaturgy in that, at base, its most common presentation is psychic phenomena. Characters are able to communicate telepathically and invade the minds of others to read their thoughts or memories. There is also a psychic attack--the mental equivalent of the shout--that came overwhelm the mind of an unguarded person and stun them or knock them unconscious. I suppose this psychic magic is hardly uncommon in literary (at least older lit) and real world belief, but it's very different from the energy-wielding magic of many modern portrayals.

Shape-changing is also common in the series, though a number of practitioners only have one form they are able to assume. Danan of Isig, for instance, is only able to turn into a tree, but that's a usual talent for hiding or resting in overland travel. Others are able to assume multiple forms in a way that would give a lot of rpgs fits due to concerns of game imbalance.

Overall, though, I think D&D magic could be molded more in the direction of this series pretty easily. A lot of it would be in reconsideration of the special effects of spells really. Oh, and for you bard fans, there's a bit of harping magic in the series too.

A Partial Gazetteer of the Planet Sagar

Sagar is the alien world that astronaut John Blackstar found on the other end of a black hole as revealed in the Filmation animated series Blackstar (1981). Here are a few of the fantastical locales he visited in the series:

CITY OF THE DESERT DWELLERS. A walled city beyond the Gorge of Winds where live an elfin people (perhaps related to the Desert Sprites) who possess the Healing Stone and guard it from the gargoyles who serve the Overlord. [ep 05]

DEMONLANDS. A barren region of jagged, coral-like formations and strange trees with boil-like growths where demons are particularly easy to summon. It is the location of a temple where the Overlord’s ally Taleena is high priestess and last worshipper. [ep 12]

MARAKAND. Floating city of the rapacious Shaldemar, the Zombie Master. The passing of Marakand leads to destruction of cities, but living beings are helplessly drawn up by its beams and Shaldemar uses his Sphere of Souls to transform his captives into soulless automatons, subject to his will. [ep 13]

TAMBORIYON. A lost city of the Ancient Ones, it lies on a jungle-choked island in the middle of a lake beyond the volcanic Flame Mountains. Tamboriyon's slender spires and domes bedecked with precious metals and jewels are now jungled-choked ruins, but the giant aumaton, Sumaro, who is the city's guardian, merely slumbers and may be reawakened by the unwise. [ep 02)

The BraveStarr Bible

 Poking around the Internet Archive yesterday, I discovered the series bible to BraveStarr, the 1987 Space Western from Filmation. The most interesting part to was the illustration. They aren't credited, but some of them have a bit of Moebius vibe.

Others strike a gritty tone that the series and remind me of illustration in pulp magazines.

Even ignoring the text, I feel like there's rpg inspiration to be found in these pages.

The Omega Team

Here's an idea for a campaign for an action/covert mission rpg. Outgunned is what I'm thinking of, but it would work with something like Top Secret/S.I. too, I think. I see it as having something of the vibe of an 80s indie comic, so keep that in mind when reading the pitch:

In the "near future" (from the 80s, so maybe it's like mid to late 90s?) a young man with immense, psychic power has gone rogue, escaping the top secret facility he has been living in. His ultimate goals are unclear, but the first thing he does is make the world's nuclear arsenals inoperable. The Soviets (they're still around) suspect some sort of U.S. super-weapon attack (which isn't far from the truth, really). Everybody's paranoid and non-nuclear war breaks out in various places around the world.

That was just this guy's first trick. What will an unstable, poorly socialized individual with almost god-like power and a grudge against the U.S. government do next? The government doesn't want to find out. The PCs are the agents they send to solve the problem--with extreme prejudice. They're the solution of last resort: the Omega Team*.

The Omega Team would be an eclectic group of experts in various fields tasked with tracking this guy down and ending his menace. He probably has recruited others with paranormal abilities (but much lower powerful levels), and he moves around a lot, so it's no easy task.

The idea shameless lifts the basic plot idea from Marvel Comics' Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja, but Akira, Thriller (the comic), Odd John, and the anime Lazarus are also inspirations, as well as 80s team stuff in general like G.I. Joe.

*The Omega Team was the name of a comic my cousin, brother, and I created as kids about a group of mutants working for the government. I've recycled it before for this idea.

The Patchwork Kingdom Crawl

 As has been pointed out before, the kind of frontier envisioned by old D&D owes more to Westerns than it does to the Western European Middle Ages or most of the fantasy works in the Appendix N. The modern idea of the "points of light" setting is perhaps closer to these things but still tends to miss the mark for many sources of the game's inspiration.

There's another option that shows up often, in disparate places from Le Morte d'Arthur to Star Trek, and many works in between. We have heroes wandering from one place to another, perhaps with a goal, perhaps not. These places are more or less civilized jurisdictions, but they have unusual customs (from the perspective of the protagonists) or eccentric or antagonist authorities. While one of the examples I mentioned above describes voyages covering a significant amount of territory (interplanetary!), some fairy tale-ish or picaresque stories (like Oz novels) do the same thing over a much smaller area: A patchwork of fiefdoms or petty kingdoms. The sort of campaign that could easily be made from a map of Holy Roman Empire:

This differs from the points of light setting in that there really isn't a distinction between wilderness for adventure and civilization for safety. In fact, the challenges of the wilderness in such stories may be much more limited than the challenges of civilization. The various eccentric monarchs and humorously dangerous social situations Manuel finds himself in in Figures of Earth are good examples, as are the strange and isolated cities John Carter visits in his wanderings across Barsoom.

The advantages of this sort of setting to me would be that it's very easy to work in all sorts of adventures from social conflict and faction stuff to traditional dungeons and overland travel.

Religion in Middle-earth

Art by Falmarin de Carme

I came across this site a couple of weeks ago that compiles additional background material generated for a Finnish Middle-earth based role-playing campaign. What I found most interesting is its extrapolation and elaboration of the religions for Middle-earth. 

This is a perceived area weakness pointed out in Tolkien's work in the past. In Imaginary Worlds, Carter notes critically that Tolkien's world "has no religion in it." In Dragon #127, Rolston in his review of Lords of Middle-earth for MERP gets to the gamer brass tacks of it:

According to Lords of Middle-earth, Middle-earth has a "seemingly inexhaustible collection of deities, pantheons, practices, and religions." However, all of them are wrong. Eru is the only god, and the Valar and the Maiar are simply his servants. Enlightened folk (Elves and Dunedain) practice a nonritualistic monotheism with no formal clergy - pretty boring stuff by FRP standards. 

A lot of epic fantasy has followed Tolkien's areligious example (Jordan's Wheel of Time series, for one) and as modern society becomes ever more secular, it probably is less and less seen as a deficit. Still, if you think of religion is a fascinating aspect of the real world well worth including in imagined worlds (where you at, Gloranthaphiles?) it's cool to see the work Sampsa Rydman has done here. The religions described build on the details provided in Tolkien's extensive writings and (so far as I am familiar with the lore) the new things added seem consistent.

For instance, the orthodox worship of Númenor is as described in terms of its simple ritual and insistence that only the king prays to Eru. The description of a Trinity of Eru, Word, and Flame Imperishable seems a credible extrapolation from details given. Likewise, the sort of Satanic faith of the Black Númenoreans is given a creed that is consistent with what me know about the downfall of their land but with reasonable details as to what Sauron might have convinced them to get them on his side. "Doing evil" (from the point of view of the doer) has historically not really been a common motivator for human religions, so it makes more sense that those that Sauron seduced to his cause were given some other line: "The Valar have wronged both you and the true god, and the true god will redress that wrong if you help him out."

Art by Angus MacBride

Of course, an issue with religion in Middle-earth is canonically we know what's true and what isn't. For a game campaign I think it might be more fun, as Rolston implies, if that weren't true. Going as far as Jacqueline Carey's The Sundering duology and switching the moral polarity of the two sides doesn't really help, but borrowing her idea that the Creator is out of the picture and the lesser gods have differing understandings or interpretations of how to carry out their mission leads to a more ambiguous situation with more possibilities for equally valid appearing religions. In other words, something like the sort of cosmologies or interpretations offered in fantasy works that utilize Judeo-Christian mythology as their backdrop. Really just making the complete truth unknowable to beings within the world (even immortal ones like the elves) would serve the same purpose, though I think most people familiar with Middle-earth would tend to make assumptions that would make this minimal change approach Less effective.

I don't think a Middle-earth game (or a game in any setting) has to have religion (unless you got clerics, in which case, you sort of already do), any more than you are required to explore any other element of culture, but if you're planning to run a long campaign I think it's an interesting facet to add.

Urshurak

Scott 'Dwarfland" Driver once opined that there was often more gaming inspiration to be had from "bad" fiction than from good. He was specifically talking about the works of Lin Carter, but I think this is often true in general. I haven't read Urshurak by the Brothers Hildebrandt and Jerry Nichols, so I can't comment on it specifically, but that seems to be the internet consensus. Here's a typical review.

Regardless, the art was surely the main selling point for purchasers in 1979. That and curiosity got me to pick it up on ebay a few months ago. It's gorgeous if you like the work of the Hildebrandt Brothers, though it could easily, I suppose be derided as too traditional or even generic nearly 50 years on. Certainly, the images and a thumbnail description of the plot mark it as a work of a more naive time when it comes to genre fantasy. There are heroes and a quest with swords and sorcerers and elves and dwarves in a vaguely faux Medieval Europe sort of setting. There are some sci-fi elements (it's a bit of fusion of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars), but no gestures toward realism, grittiness or deconstruction to be found.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia, but naive fantasy has a certain sort of appeal to me, though. It's not that I never want fantasy to go new places, but having seen the new places it has gone over the decades become, in their own way, stale or cliched or really shine in their focus on aspects other than adventure and action (which are the most relatable of fictional elements to the gaming table), I sometimes feel the pull for gaming inspiration to the things that wouldn't have made my reading list a decade or so ago.

And honestly, more fantasy epics could probably benefit from high tech Amazons. 

A Pantheon from Kirby's New Gods

Art by Alex Ross

Jack Kirby's so-called "Fourth World," an interconnected group of series at DC Comics from 1970-1973, posits a new group of god-like beings emerging from Ragnarok. These beings are presented and engage in action largely like other modern-era superheroes, but I've been thinking about whether one could make a pantheon from them usable in a traditional, medievalish fantasy game.

A notable trait of the so-called New Gods is that they are arranged in a sort of dualistic polytheism (not unlike the gods of Tekumel in Empire of the Petal Throne). The gods of New Genesis are the "good" gods and those Apokolips are the "evil" gods. 

As presented in the comics, the portfolios of the Apokolipsian gods (to the extent they are clear) are modern evils. They are mostly related to concerns of its author in post-World War II West, rather than traditional concerns of ancient or Medieval peoples. They will require some modification. They work better as devils or demons, probably, as Apokolips is pretty much Hell.

Interestingly, the stories that take place on Apokolips regarding the escape of Mister Miracle and friends have an almost gnostic dimension. Darkseid is a Demiurge sort of figure, while the Promethean Himon is the serpent in the stifling, poisonous Garden of Apokolips leading Mister Miracle to freedom.

In contrast, the gods of New Genesis are a bit more straightforward, harkening in many cases to Norse or Greek polytheistic figures. The problem is they just don't always have really clearly portfolios. 

Anyway, here's what I've got:

New Genesis:

• Highfather - Patriarchal leader of the gods of New Genesis. God of Wisdom, Diplomacy, and Rulership.
• Lightray - God of light, probably the sun too.
• Orion - God of War; given to berserker rages.
• Mister Miracle - A dying and rising god, probably with a mystery cult.
• Big Barda - Warrior goddess; defector from Apokolips
• Black Racer - Psychopomp and god of Death.
• Lonar - the Wanderer; god of horses and hospitality
• Metron - God of knowledge and travel.

Apokolips:

• Darkseid - Supreme god of evil.
• Kalibak - Monstrous son of Darkseid; god of violence and destruction.
• DeSaad - Lord of torture and cruelty
• Doctor Bedlam - God of Madness
• Female Furies - A (more) evil version of Valkyries
• Glorious Godfrey - God of Lies
• Granny Goodness - The cruel mother; a stealer of children, perhaps a Baba Yaga sort?
• Kanto - God of assassins
• Mantis - Vampiric lord of plagues and pestilence
• Steppenwolf - Dark lord of the hunt