Wednesday Comics: Storm: City of the Damned

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

Storm: City of the Damned (1982) (part 5)
(Dutch: Stad der Verdoemden)
Art by Don Lawrence & Script by Kelvin Gosnell

Storm and Ember take the winged horse to the ancient, ceremonial gate at the bottom of the city, which they believe will lead them to Gor's lair. They're right, and the green-skinned psychic watches them on a viewscreen--and waits.

Storm and Ember descend into the depths of the caverns beneath the city, thinking they'll find Gor at the lowest level. The walls to a passage way grow arms out of them and try to stop them:

Next they fight bat-creatures and pass precariously over flows of lava until they reach Gor's sanctum:

They easily disarmed Pulg, the dwarfish head of Gor's personal guard, but Gor himself proves tougher. He disarms Ember easily them brags about the extent of his power. Storm suggests there's one thing he can't do: travel through time.

Gor admits that is true, but counters he'll soon have control over the computer in the city. Not all time machines are big and unwieldy. Storm throws the time machine belt at Gor, a belt with only enough power for a one way trip! Gor is gone to the end of time.

Back in the city, the war is over. Gor's troops have stopped fighting. Both groups can work together to rebuild.

Storm still has his one request to make of the central computer, Terminal One. Storm argues that computers should serve humans, not control:

Storm and Ember leave the people of their city to chart there own future without the computer.

Hubris Arrives

I was going to title this post "The Hubris of Mike Evans," but that would be a title for a negative review--and this ain't one of those. On the heels of the successful Kickstarter, I mentioned some cool highlights from my read-through of the early backers copy, but I figured with it available to everyone, I figured it was a good time to do another walkthrough.

Mike subtitles his work "a world of visceral adventure" and everything in here works to support that tone. It is, after all, a world made from the "fetid corpse of a dead god." Mike uses the Dungeon Crawl Classics ruleset which (to my mind) is sort of blacklight poster/70s comic sword & sorcery. It's a good fit, but Mike twists it into a "90s comic by Danzig with art by Simon Bisley" sort of direction. Mike's world-building is aided and abetted in this regard by the art work which includes stuff by Jeremy Duncan and Doug Kovacs, among several other worthies. This group knows how to draw weird shit and monsters.

So the tone is consistent, but what do we actually get? There are nine new classes and races; things like a Blood Witch (a bit like Last Airbender's blood benders but way more EVIL!) and the Murder Machine (Warforged but with the Metal turned to 11). There are new magic items and new spells, all table-ready and (in case of the spells) detailed in full DCC style.

A big section is the "Territories of Hubris" chapter. This is the sort of thing that bogs down a lot of setting books, but Hubris focuses on the interesting bits, so little wordage is wasted and it is surprisingly usable with little prep.

There is a grab-bag of tools and generators, some of the them sort of random (you know what I mean), but great utilities with some flavorful results. This section shows the influence of products like Vornheim.

Finally, there is not one but two short adventures, one of which is a zero level funnel. This is really useful in making the setting come to life because it shows how the writer does it. It's the sort of thing a lot of single-author setting books would do well to emulate.

If any of that sounds cool to you, you should really check Hubris out. On sale now!

Baroque Space Troika! Style

Reading over Daniel Sell's rules for Troika! Basic, and I am utterly charmed. I wrote up some backgrounds for Baroque Space using the ruleset. It's a great way to get really setting-appropriately flavored characters easy:

BLEMMYE (ACEPHALOID)
You are a squat, muscular savage, belligerent and possibly anthropophagous, with a face on your torso.

Possessions
War club
Filed teeth (damage as knife)
Fetish or Talisman

Skills
6 Language (their own savage tongue)
2 Awareness
3 Club Fighting
2 Strength
1 Tracking
2 Wrestling

BROTHER OF THE BELT
You are a buccaneer of that rebel society of the asteroids, who find fraternity among thieves adhering to a simple code: No member may  rob or cheat another, loot must be apportioned by established rules, and no captain may command without being elected by the crew.

Possessions
Cutlass
Mechanical eye, hidden mostly behind a patch, but capable of scuttling ambulation on unfolding limbs. It can record what it seems for 15 minutes and relay it upon reinsertion.
Pistol
breathing-dress (counts as modest armor)

Skills
2 Astrology
3 Climbing
2 Pilot
2 Sword Fighting
2 Pistol Fighting

GAMESTER

You are an inveterate gambler, late of the Jovial gaming houses.

Possessions

Deck of Marked Cards

Dueling Pistol of overly elaborate design 

Jovian Dice (d6, in various kaleidoscopic Neoplatonic solids)

Non-Euclidean Laputan Habiliments

Skills

2 Awareness

2 Etiquette

1 Evaluate

1 Sleight of Hand

2 Pistol Fighting

3 Secret Signs - Tells

LUNAR CASTAWAY

You have been recently rescued from the silvery Lunar wastes where you were long marooned.

Possessions

Antique Musket

Fantastical yet rustic clothing

Journal and writing implement

Semi-transparent body owing to long subsistence on Lunar fruit

Skills

3 Awareness 

2 Language - Selenite telepathy

1 Musket Fighting

2 Run

2 Tracking

MERCURIAN COURTIER

What is there in life for you now that you have been compelled to flee the shining court of His Heliocephaliac Majesty, Helios XXIII, Emperor of Mercury? The other worlds are so cold! Still you persevere. 

Possessions

Mercurian Court Fashion: powdered whig, cache-sexe, corset, jabot or a doublet, pantaloons, stockings, and heels --and a mantled cloak.

Mercurian shaded lens on a stick OR goggles

Light-blocking ointment

Muff Pistol

Stiletto

Skills

3 Etiquette

2 Gambling

3 Language - Mercurian

1 Knife Fighting

2 Pistol Fighting

RUDE MECHANICAL

You are a Mechanical android. Glimpses of variegated lights blinking through the crack in your brazen skull tell the tale: You are malfunctioning and masterless, certainly, but also possibly possessed of radical political views.

Skills

2 in a weapon or improvised weapon of choice

3 in a skill related to your primary function (Etiquette, Mathmology, Evaluate, Craft Skill, etc.)

2 in a Language of choice

1 Strength

1 Run

Possessions

Repair kit

Weapon or improvised weapon of choice

Special

Mechanicals do not heal like natural folk, but must spend an evening in repair. For each hour of rest with access to repair tools regain 3 Stamina.

You always have the equivalent of light armor.

SPACE COOK

You are a veteran of many voyages and an essential member of any astronef crew. It is often no mean feat to wring something edible from the bounty of the spontaneous generation vats, and occasionally, you succeed.

Possessions

Bottle of rotgut

Cleaver

Pistol

Vials of salt and various exotic spices

Venerian Jabbering Monkey 

Skills

1 Awareness

2 Cooking

1 Strength

2 Axe (Cleaver) Fighting

2 Pistol Fighting

2 Fist Fighting

Wednesday Comics: Cosmic Tales

Storm will resume next week, after the holiday. Today, I want to point you (again) to a webcomic done by Mike "Aos" Gibbons: Cosmic Tales. It's got a Bronze Age charm that you will dig if you dig Bronze Age comics, and if you don't you haven't been paying attention to my comics posts over the years. Check it out.

The Weird Life Cycle of Elves

What humans mistake as different tribes or clades of elves are actually different stages in their millennia long, perhap endless, lives.

Wood elves are elven adolescents. They rebel against their parents and go to live in bands of others of their age. They throw racuous parties in the woods and experiment with intoxicants. They are capricious, emotional, and cliqueish. Their tribes run the gamut between Woodstock and Lord of the Flies.

High elves are elven adults. They interact most with other species and are responsible for the maintenance of elven civilization. It is in this age cohort that the immortality of elves begans to take its toll, however. Elven brains are not structurally that different from humans. They do not have the capacity to hold countless centuries of memories. Their initial compensatory mechanism is monomania. Elves develop a strong interest that narrows the array of factual information they must recall and provides constant reinforcement for the things they find important. Some become swordsmasters, some master artists or craftsmen, some archmages.

For some elves this is enough, and they grow more skilled, more focused, and stranger, until they become almost demigods in their chosen vocation. These are the Gray.

Others, though, are not able to maintain such focus. Something akin to dementia sets in. They become forgetful, and paranoid. As they begin to lose their past--lose themselves--they find only intense or traumatic memories linger long. These are the dark elves.

Dark because of the darkness that consumes their minds; dark for the deeds they commit to hold on to self and not slip into mindless reverie. They go to live in the dungeons of their kind to pursue intense pleasures and horrors or simply howl or cackle in the darkness. These elders are feared by other elves. They avoid them and will not speak of them to nonelves.

The Dictionary of Azurth Updated

It has been about six months since my last update to the Dictionary Azurth, so it was due. You'll find new entries for the Book of Doors, the Etheric Realm, Queen Hyacinthia, Paper Town, the Super-Wizards, and the Uncanny Valley. Probably something else I forgot, too,

On the Western

What follows are some observations on media in the Western genre (mostly film and tv, but comics and even novels are probably not exempt) brought on by a discussion of Westworld. These may be relevant to Old West gaming--if you want to evoke the feel of media rather than historic simulation.

Westerns are Fantasies, not in the sense of genre fantasy, but as in taking place in a fictionalized milieu. This is obscured by historical fictions in Western garb, numerous Westerns loosely based on real events (My Darling Clementine and Doc are both about the OK Corral but just about all they have in common are the names of some historical personages), and the fact that even the most ahistorical Westerns use elements of real history like locations or Native American groups.

But beyond the disregard for strict historical accuracy (a World War II machine gun in the Civil War setting of Fist Full of Dollars or The Wild Bunch's fuzzy placement during the Mexican Civil War) common to films, we have the almost ritual performance of emerging statehood in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence the mystery play of  civilization arriving with the railroad in Once Upon A Time in the West, or the alt-history Tombstone of Forty Guns.All these films have in common a heavy use of the tropes and elements of "the Old West" without any specific historical references.

Scenery is More than Location. John Ford put the striking vistas of Monument Valley in a number of films and in doing so placed it all over the West--maybe even actually in Utah at some point! When Sergio Leone gets to make a Western in the U.S. he shoots there, too. I can't think of a single grim slaughter or dramatic shootout in a film in the shadow of say West Mitten Butte. That isn't the portion of the Matter of the West that is performed in that sort of place. Men tend to die in narrow canyons or scrub desert plains in California or maybe Spain. The enactment of the mythology does not respect distance or realistic topography. A perfect encapsulation of this is Once Upon A Time in the West (it's title suggesting its mythic narrative): The town of Sweetwater and the rail station are in Spain, but Monument Valley lies between the two. Frank and his gang hole up somewhere in the vicinity of Mesa Verde. The generic West must contain all this disparate real estate in days ride or so.

One gaming thought related to the above: Would a Western work devoid of much of those real world references (no matter how thin)? Could you set a Western in some Ruritania-esque fictional state or territory? Probably going to completely fictional stand-in for North America would go to far (without magic to signify genre fantasy), but maybe not.