Chances Are Walter Velez Has Illustrated Your Game

Sure, it's the Frazettas and Fabians, or Blanches and Buscemas--or even Elmores and Caldwells whose art fueled most of our gaming imaginations, but at least for my game, the works of George Velez hit a bit closer to what the reality is at the table.

Exhibit A. See that? That's a pudgy wizard running from a dragon that looks like it doesn't have a whole lot of hit points.

This is all the PCs trying to parley with the leader of the NPCs at once.

The fight didn't go exactly how you planned? Quelle suprise.

Hassled by annoying little people? It's been known to happen.

Wednesday Comics: Storm: The Battle for Earth

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Battle for Earth (1980) (part 5)
(Dutch: De Strijd om de Aarde)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Dick Matena

The Azurian ship arrives to take Storm to Mars for negotiations and exchange him for Ember. As soon as Storm is aboard the spaceship, "Ember" is revealed to be merely a projection.

Soon, the real Ember and Storm are brought before the Grand Council. They are offered the choice of having their minds erased--or death. They choose death rather than live as puppets under the alien yoke.

Meanwhile, Solon and Balder have traveled to Mars. They free the convicts working on the canal and incite them to revolt. In the chaos, the former Supervisor runs off with a plan to restore his position.

He is brought before the Grand Council and informs them of the army that's coming. He asks only for the right to kill Storm and Ember who brought about is discommendation. The Council grants his request:

The execution is broadcast to the rebels to get them to stop fighting. Storm and Ember appear to be blasted to nothingness. The Grand Council is confused by the lack of bodies. The Supervisor reveals his deception. Those two are useful to him and the Grand Council who humiliated him is not:

The Supervisor plans to complete his coup on another Azurian colony. He takes a spacecraft and forces Storm and Ember to go with him. Storm secretly programs a random coordinates in the dimension control, however, and they are dropped into the middle of a storm. The Supervisor, convinced the larger craft is doomed, abandons ship in a small vessel.

Storm manages to safe the ship and pilot it back to Mars. There they reunite with their friends and make plans for peaceful co-existence with the Azurian former convicts. Many other Azurian former colonists accept the treaty as well, but on the Moon, a new Grand Council of hardliners forms. An armada of ships sets out for Earth to purge the disloyal Azurians and kill Storm!

Into the Ether

Our 5e Land of Azurth game continued last night with the party finally getting a demonstration from Princess Viola of the projector they found several sessions ago. The projector is an etheric viewer and if left on long enough, it can open a portal into the etheric realm. Within the glowing circle of light cast by projector the party sees the guy above trying desperately to get their attention!

When they can finally talk with him, he says he is a Super-Wizard named Zuren-Ar. He claims to have rebelled against his people for their crimes--the crimes that led to their destruction--and was made a political prisoner in the Etheric Zone for his trouble. His partner was also a dissident, and she is imprisoned somewhere "even worse." That worse place is the Carnelian Hypercube, a prison in the deep either where those who offend the gods (perpetrators of "Crimes Most Cosmic") are locked up.

Zuren-Ar would be detected due to his immense super-wizardry, but he reasons the weaker PCs could slip into the prison. And he has a plan to do it.

The players were not immediately trusting of Zuren-Ar, but no one from the Princess to the Abbot of the local shrine of the Handmaiden of Knowledge had a lot of information on the Super-Wizards or the Hypercube to refute his story. Eventually, their desire for adventure and their hope for treasure carried the day. They got the Princess to blast their weapons and armor with radiation to make them ethereal-ready, and off they went.

Zuren-Ar's plan was this: He knew of a bounty hunter transport of prisoners headed for the Hybercube. The party could take them out and use the bounty hunters' credentials to get past the ten-eyed giant security guardians on the outer surface of the Hypercube.

The bounty hunters and their caged captives were on the back of a giant eel-thing. The hunters were a motley bunch of "astral mutants." The leader, Maloclus:

And his compatriots, the warrior-monk Maarta and the very excitable, necro-blast wielding Drednar:

The hunters were tough, but six on three (Zuren-Ar sat back to gauge his allies' ability) wasn't a fair fight. Their strange weapons, alas, were not particularly lootable as Maarta's sputtering energy blades required psychic training and discipline, Drednar's wailing-ghost necrogun was powered by his personal connection to the Negative Energy Realm, and Maloclus's plate armor was cursed (according to Zuren-Ar).

The party talked with the other prisoners. Only two of the three were left as a negative energy being had escape during the melee. One was a rabbit-man named Jaka Oloap from the world of Lagomorfa who claimed his crime was offending the Bright Lady (Rabbit Folk goddess of the Moon) by flying a craft to the moon and crashing the rabbit godlings' lunar revelry. The other was an elderly sadsack who said his crime was instituting "excessive bureaucracy" when he was administrator of his world. Neither of them were going to rat the PCs out to the prison guards.

The lizard man piloting the eel just wanted to get home to his latest five hundred hatchlings, so he piloted on. To the Hypercube they went...

Ethereal & Astral

My 5e Land of Azurth game continues this afternoon and it may well see the PCs sojourning into the Etheric Zone (i.e. Ethereal Plane). Here are some old classic posts I wrote on the two from which I'm be mining some ideas:

"Plane Talk About Ethereal Matters"
"Ad Astral (Plane)"

Discovering the Hill Cantons: Some Questions for Chris Kutalik

As any reader of my blog knows, setting creation is an interest of mine. With Misty Isles of the Eld out, it seemed like a good time to pique the brain of a consummate rpg world-builder, Chris Kutalik.

Some things you’ve said have given me the impression that the Hill Cantons evolved from earlier settings of yours or at least revisions of earlier setting ideas. Is that the case? What relationship does the current setting bare to the ur-Cantons?

I had played a couple months of 3.5 (my only exposure) in an Austin's friends immediately before launching the Hill Cantons in early 2009—but it was the first time that I had played a tabletop rpg after an almost 25-year break. I had fallen back into my first love, historical miniature wargaming, three years before (mostly for the zen of painting miniatures over frigid Detroit winters).

Starting to think about actually running a campaign just opened up the flood gates of my imagination, but the first rush of things was heavily influenced by the hobby-driven reading of periods I was painting armies for. The pike and shot era (16th-17th century) was pretty high on that list and it just clicked with my deep impressions of the whitewashed Slovak towns I lived in with their baroque chapels and museums to forgotten wars against the Turks. And my brain was on fire with Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy (With Fire and Sword, the Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe),  a series set in the anarchic steppe wilderness of the then immense Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. I just knew that my game had to have broad-mustachioed, fierce (but noble) cossacks, feathered hussars and the great sweep of a vast, hotly-contested borderlands. That vision melded in my mind with my own personal obsession  with the heretic-driven battles and social upheaval of Bohemia of the Hussite Wars. So the ur-Cantons was something much more of a thinnly-skinned, mush up of a real world time and place—very much the setting of a historical wargamer in other words.

But a funny thing happened as I got closer to the game and had to design adventure sites.  I revisited on the fiction front old fantasy favorites like Jack Vance. Lyonesse in particular swept me away and the tone and flavor started seeping in. But even more so in the first year was the gonzo spirit of Holmes basic (my first brush with the game). So you had sleestaks sharing hill tops with wandering, puffy-shirted and slash-hosed landsknechts trading bits of repartee.

In other words all this shit got thrown into a stew that was still pretty distinct at first but increasingly just became its own thing with its own peculiar dynamics.

One thing I love about the published Cantons stuff is the mix of “serious” world-building, pulp fantasy color world-building, and some outright farce (much of which seems drawn from personal experience)? Is that all accidental or do you have a clear idea when you write something whether it feels like the Cantons or doesn’t?

Hmm that's a surprisingly difficult question. I think you hit some of the Big Three in the Hill Cantons, a mixture of: a. my love intellectual exploration of our pre-industrial world (so I will geek out reading an in-depth study of weird-seeming currencies like spiral snail shells and coral cones in Africa that gets translated into a whole giant snail hunting economy inside a ruined, time-shifted city); b.There is a layer of the Hill Cantons that is for sure accidental in that it evolves straight out of the unpredicatibility of play in a long campaign with beautifully anarchic players. So you have on-the-spot creation and co-creation that come straight out of the whimsy of the moment. Like when Cole (who plays the murderous clown Taurus) asked me in the middle of a session, “how do you have half orcs but no vanilla humanoids in your world?” Which led to a whole somewhat hilarious narrative between the two of us about how orc slave-lovers were a hotly-fought over population in the decadent Hyperborean civilization yadda yadda.

But most of it is not purely accidental, yet also not totally intentional in the strictest sense of the word. Mostly when I am writing or just ruminating on the setting there is a huge amount of free association involved and it's occasionally quirky ass stuff well out what I normally draw on when thinking about D&D and rpgs. So the usual wells are books or personal experiences.

The humor often comes out of the particular dry, pessimistic strain of  Czech humor with its two souls of low humor farce and absurd, subtle satire (put together in some of the Czech classics like Hasek's Good Corporal Svejk) and that's as much or more about my upbringing as its my reading. Like you can hear the dark humor of my dad channeled into a lot of those places in the Cantons.

I think it explains my attraction to Vance's picaresque writing and how his tone and thematic attention to the absurdity of human social and religious mores show up a lot in the world. (You know, when it's not just killing creatures and taking their shit in a dungeon.)

So you know the players run into a buzz-saw-wielding Human Resources bot repeating “downsizing” or hear rumors of the Isle of Bureaucrats and its troubles with the neighboring Isle of Cannibals. Or encountering (and freeing) the chained and dying Slavic Pagan god, Veles, under a lake near their holding.

Your players (at least on G+) have contributed elements to the Cantons that have appeared in publications? I would think there would have to be something a player has come up with at some point that just didn’t fit with your conception or you just didn’t like. Do you have a canonical Cantons in your read and another at the table (like Barker’s “real Tekumel”) or do you just let it go where it goes?

They have indeed, especially Fever-Dreaming Marlinko which has probably more than a healthy amount of easter eggs and campaign in-jokes. Co-creation has always been something I enjoy in the running of the campaign (you know like that half-orc joke above). I bent the stick back a bit in the published version of Misty Isles, a campaign area that the players have never actually reached. It's for the best perhaps as Marlinko did get some constructive criticism over the in-jokey Church of the Blood Jesus, a syncretistic marriage between the medieval church and local dionsyiac rites founded by a drunk Irish priest player-character. In retrospect I would have cut the entire section. It worked well enough an organic evolving humor bit in the campaign, but it's thematically jarring and perhaps borderline puerile in translation.

That last question is well-timed. I had the good fortune in playing in a Jakallan underworld game at North Texas RPG Con a few days ago with Victor Raymond, a former player in MAR Barker's Thursday Night group. Chatting with him the next day he relayed how often when Barker was asked if such and such NPC created by a EPT gamemaster would fit into his Tekumel, the professor would more often than not say something like “oh yes such and such, I know him well” and then launch into a long discursion about his or her personality and position in the empire. I love to death that embrace of others creativity alongside the absolute confidence, the real sense of weight and reality in your own mindspace world (also what a wonderful bit of showmanship, really).

I'm not there (yet at least). I will freely admit to spending stressful hours at work or late insomnia nights ruminating and day-dreaming about totally non-game related parts of the setting like what a typical day is like in the streets of Marlinko, but really it's much more of a place that evolves with the needs and events of the game. It's very much still just a place to sustain D&D like things in other words.

Well mostly.

Storm: The Battle for Earth

My exploration of the long-running euro-comic Storm, continues. Earlier installments can be found here.

Storm: The Battle for Earth (1980) (part 5)
(Dutch: De Strijd om de Aarde)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Dick Matena

The saucer holds an Inspector of the Azurian Grand Council. His arrival (plus a timely avalanche) allows Storm and Solon to escape capture--and even comandeer the saucer. For all his failures, the Supervisor will be expected to give an accounting before the Council.

Storm and Solon discover the ship they have us a dimension-ship when they find themselves in another universe--and under attack by a winged, reptilian creatures that live in space. The creatures are about to break into ship, but Solon shifts them again to a watery world. That doesn't turn out so well, either:

They shift a third time, and finally, they're back in the Himalayas. The creature attached to their ship dies. By the time they get back to the monastery, though, the Supervisor and the Inspector have taken off, bound for the Grand Council on Mars--and again taken Ember with them.

On Mars, the Grand Council punishes the Supervisor for so mismanaging things on Earth. It's set to work with other convicts on the dome-vaulted canals. The Grand council plans to correct the Supervisor's mistakes--and the first step in that agenda is dealing with Storm.

They contact Earth and demand Storm come to Mars, otherwise Ember will be killed. Storm agrees, only on the condition that the ship that comes to bring him to Mars will also return Ember to Earth. It's agreed.

TO BE CONTINUED

I Was Going to Stat These Guys for 5e...

...but I was too tired after getting home from NTrpgcon, so "Toast" and "Toast, Burnt" will have to wait. I did not get the Field Guide to Encounters (where those two "monsters" come from), but I did get this other old Judge's Guild stuff from the con: Shield Maidens of Sea Rune and Operation Ogre. The former is part of the Wilderlands, the latter has a fairytalish cover and a modernish title and content that doesn't really match either. In fact, Siembieda draws a completely different sort of ogre on the cover than the interior. I also picked up what a think is the last of the Talislanta books I didn't have, Thystram's Collectanea, and the Role-Aids supplement, Undead.

I demured from Chaosium's Thieves' World Companion and some Japanese D&D modules, mostly due to price--beyond the quite reasonable objection that I wouldn't use them. Not a bad haul, though.