What Star Wars Got Right

Still working my way through Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Season One, delayed by the arrival January and the return of network TV from the holiday doldrums.

I've had many discussions over the years with various friends about what is "wrong" with the Star Wars films--and there are a lot of things. Mainly though, they boil down to bad writing. Well more completely stated it's: Lucas isn't a good writer compounded by the fact that Lucas isn't a good director of actors.

It's no accident that the best of the Star Wars Saga, The Empire Strikes Back, was at least partially written by Leigh Brackett--someone who surely knew how to write.

But anyway, that's a topic for another blog, maybe.  I'm not interested in revisitng the hate, but in accentuating the positive, to wit: What's good about Star Wars? And what's good that might be applicable to gaming?

To me, the core "good thing" is that Star Wars melds together two predominant forms of sci-fi adventure media (I specify this as it has very little to do with science fiction as a literary genre--even the science fiction sub-genre space opera only shares a few similarities with Star Wars until after Star Wars enters the public Zeitgeist).

The two types are:

• Euro-style daring-do: This is sword-fights, castles, and princess-kidnapping villains. Like John Carter or Flash Gordon. The action and plots resemble The Prisoner of Zenda, and the latter-day stories can be seen as sort of allegories for young America interacting with the Old (decadent) World (Burroughs' The Mad King, comes to mind)..
• "the flyboy" or square-jawed aviator tale: This is rockets and jetpacks, leather helmets and robots. This is like Buck Rogers, and Burroughs' Beyond the Farthest Star, and any number of serials--and both aviation and science fiction pulps at times. A purer modern example would be Sky Captain.

Star Wars eliminates the problem of having to give up jetpacks for swashbuckling by putting them both together! And this is not a bad idea. The incoherence that would be created by aviators wearing swords is resolved by giving the swords only to a select group (the jedi)--this was an innovation discovered by accident, it seems. Lucas' early drafts had "laserswords" being more commonly used.

But this still isn't all of Star Wars. Lucas lacquered it with Japanese exoticism by cribbing design, plot elements, and character from Kurosawa. Shooting in Tunisia, and having an expert in African languages provide him with Greedo's lingo and Jabba's Huttese further lathered on the exoticism. So another element of Star Wars is what we might think of as a sort of chinoiserie (if I can be allowed to somewhat misappropriate a term, when a better one doesn't exist). This is probably the element of Star Wars that I most think about playing up when I've though "How could Star Wars be better?"  This would lead to a Star Wars more like Dune, or most likely, more like a Heavy Metal story (or the Star Wars (and Dune) inspired Metabarons).

We're not done yet. The last piece, is latter century Americana. The original trilogy can't escape its 70s vibe, in some ways. Some of that is accidental no doubt--an artifact of when it was made. Other parts--primarily cut scenes of Luke and his teen friends--transplant American Graffiti car-culture to Tattooine. Episode II even gives us a 50s style diner! These elements are wholly Star Wars and not found in really any of its progenitors or imitators that I'm aware of (One Han Solo novel in the late seventies gives us an explicit disco, as well!).

So how might this be used in gaming? Well, I know that if I was looking to create my own Star War-ish space opera/science fantasy campaign, I'd look to these elements to make sure I got it right. Also, I think these can kind of be used like dials--one could turn down the elements one didn't like in Star Wars, while cranking others to eleven. If you want more Dune, play up the "exoticness," and chunk the Americana; more Sky Captain, means more swooping spaceships and fewer swords or Samurai movie borrowings.  If one wanted Star Wars that didn't feel like Star Wars, eliminating two, or perhaps even just one, of the elements above would probably do it.

Enter the Lost World

"In the savage world of Skartaris, life is a constant struggle for survival. Here, beneath an unblinking orb of eternal sunlight, one simple law prevails: If you let down your guard for an instant you will soon be very dead."

So begins just about every issue of the longest running sword-and-sorcery saga in comic book history not based on a Robert E. Howard creation. It’s the story of Lieutenant-Colonel Travis Morgan, USAF, who is forced to ditch his SR-71 blackbird in the arctic circle, but instead winds up in a tropical jungle under an eternal sun, and is soon saving a sword-wielding, fur-wearing, princess with supermodel looks from a velociraptor.

Then things get really weird.

Over the course of the thirteen-plus years, 133 issues and 6 annuals, original run, Travis Morgan wandered through the dream-logic geography of a collective pulp unconscious world—a mash-up of prehistoric adventure, sword and sorcery, comic book sci-fi, and Bullfinch’s mythology, seasoned with a little Tolkienian epic. Damsels were saved a-plenty, monsters were slain, spells were cast, and swashes were definitely buckled. And since June 2009, Mike Grell, The Warlord's creator, has been the guiding hand for more of the same in a new series.

For the uninitiated, I'll summarize the basic set-up. The aforementioned Travis Morgan winds up in Skartaris, a world inside the hollow earth, bearing a strong resemblance to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar. Like most Burroughs protagonists, Morgan wins himself a princess and a kingdom. The main difference between The Warlord and most of Burroughs ouevre is the existence of magic. At first, this is teased as perhaps only the misunderstood, remnant advanced technology from a lost Atlantean civilization, but eventually true sorcery rears its head. This element, and the structure of most of the stories, lends a more sword and sorcery feel to the proceedings, than Burroughsian pastiche.

The Warlord was one of my favorite comics as a kid. It also provided a lot of inspiration for gaming in my early dungeon-mastering years. Well before Aaron Allston's campaign setting for D&D's Mystara line, my players were venturing into a hollow world. Like Skartaris, a couple of my campaign worlds have had a wandering moon whose movements weren't predictable. I also borrowed the cursed hellfire sword (first appearing in issue #34)--which had to draw blood every time it was drawn, even if it be the wielder's--and inflicted it on one of my players.

Skartaris was, and is, what would be called, in gaming parlance, a "kitchen sink" world. It's full of creatures from classical and medieval mythology, remnant super-science from Atlantis, aliens, sorcery, barbarians, lost tech from our world, time-travel, malfunctioning AIs, and of course, dinosaurs. In true "show don't tell" visual storytelling fashion this "anything goes" philosophy is driven home by great images: a tyrannosaur snatching up a unicorn in its jaws; a group of primitive cultists sacrificing a woman on an altar that's actually a crashed SR-71 jet.

One of the most interesting things to me about all this, and one of the things I find inspirational when considering rpg setting creation, is that Grell provides a rationale for these disparate elements existing together. In the distant past, we're told, Skartaris was Wizard World, a high fantasyish Tolkien-lite kind of world of elves, dwarves, wizards, and the like. After a time, for reasons never fully explained as I recall, this civilization waned. In the millennia that followed, openings to the outer earth allowed prehistoric animals to enter and avoid the extinct that claimed their fellows. Sometime later, an Atlantean fleet fleeing the destruction of their homeland arrived in Skartaris and built a technologically advanced civilization, only to have it end in nuclear war. Civilization slowly climbed back to the pseudo-Medieval level of the Warlord's time.

Ok, so I didn't say it was an airtight rationale, but its plenty good enough for gaming.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think this sort of "kitchen sink" fantasy might be exactly what I want to do with my next campaign. Maybe.

Of course, I'll still need to find a way to throw some Planet of the Apes/Kamandi elements in there, but I'm sure "the kitchen" sink is big enough.

Post-Game Report: What Lurks Below

Last Sunday, we continued our Warriors & Warlock campaign, using a somewhat re-imagined version of Paizo's Shadow in the Sky in the Second Darkness adventure path.  The characters were, as before: Zarac the fighter, Renin the psionicist, and Gannon, the thief-monk.

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they had just finished a pitch battle with a group of thieves and thugs hired to ambush them, by their (previously) trusted employer, Saltus, at the Grinning Goblin Gambling House. When their employer slipped into some secret tunnels, the players encountered their first dilemma of the evening--whether to loot the gambling house or give chase.

They did a little of both, allowing Saltus to make good his escape into a cave system ("smuggler's tunnels") beneath the gambling house. After delivering the coup de grace to a psionically stunned boar (the pet of Saltus' right-hand lackey), they quickly determined that none of them were particularly skilled at lock-picking, and so it fell to the psionicist to crush the locked trapdoor with his mental powers.

By then, their desire to get revenge on Saltus was beginning to pick up. It allowed them to avoid arousing Zarac's usually ever-present avarice, which would no doubt have led them to a submerged pirate treasure--but all a vengeful wight. Instead, they chose a different branch and wound up activating magical stalactites which served as a sort of cave security system for a den of troglodytes. These guys had their gambling interrupted:

So throwing down their "simple but inane" (according to the module) game, they came running for the party. The dice were fickle for the trogs. They kept getting natural "twenties" and equally natural "ones"--making them alternate between shrugging off the PCs best blows, and crumpling like paper. One troglodyte went down before they're even in melee range, felled by Renin's mind-bullets.

The other three didn't fall so easy. Zarac (already injured from the battle above ground) and Renin took wounds before they dispatched their foes. Each of the player's put down one trog, and Zarac delivered a killing stroke to the one previously blasted into unconsciousness by Renin.

So far so good--except the sounds of battle had alerted the other trogs, and the remaining adult males of the den came running. The PCs quickly assessed the odds, and made a strategic retreat. They climbed back up to the basement of the gambling hall, then removed the ladders, so the troglodytes couldn't follow.  They had by then recognized the odd smell they had noted in the basement earlier as a lingering sign of troglodyte presence, and weren't eager to have such visitations repeated.

They assumed that Saltus must have escaped. Again they returned to searching the various rooms of gambling house for valuables, or something that might explain his betrayal.

They'd forgotten something.

They forgot the elven ranger that lent them a hand last adventure, and the warning he gave of a renegade elf, apparently working with Saltus, at some unknown purpose. They forgot, and gave their hidden adversary, warned by her troglodyte minions, time to escape.

While they broke into the gambling hall's strangely sparsely funded vault, the weird shadow in the sky that had previously been of much interest, disappeared. While they sat at a bar, trying to figure out how to sell the business they now found themselves in possession of--and who to sell it to--a falling star streaked across the night sky. It slammed into a small island just beyond the harbor, leading to a earthquake and a tsunami.

These natural disasters had been foreshadowed by the dream that had brought Renin to Raedelsport. A dream the PCs had spent parts of several sessions trying to find someone to interpret. The looks on the players' faces when realization dawned was priceless.

The session ended with the characters looking out over the chaos in the city from the second floor of the Grinning Goblin, wondering just what might happen next.

Something I found interesting about the module was that it had a timeline of events that played out on their on. The players were able to interact with them, but they didn't require the PCs to be railroaded into doing so--were free to pursue their own agenda, and often did. While definitely a scenario with a plot (at least in the background), rather than a sandbox, I found it to have a lighter touch than other "story-centric" modules I've played in the past.

The conversion to Warriors & Warlocks has taken some extra work. Luckily, a large numbers of D&D monsters have been statted in Mutants & Masterminds terms on The Atomic Think Tank Message Boards. The three week breaks between sessions should have helped--and I suppose they did, in terms of providing more time to procrastinate.

The long between game intervals probably also led to player's forgetting some important details. From my perspective, this didn't impair the adventure in anyway, though the players felt the lack at times. Since they were relying on notes anyway, that just means they need to take better ones.

Overall, I think a good time was had by all.

In about a month, we undertake Chapter 2: Children of the Void.