Whale Hunting in the Skies of Azurth

 Our Land of Azurth 5e game continued last Sunday with the party on their way to Virid (still!) and encountering an odd character repairing an airship of the sort they had seen used by the Cloud Folk. He gave his name as Captain Ahab Flint and told them his profession was recovering treasure from balloon whales.

It seems these large but slow-moving creatures sifted clouds for food and invariably swallowed all sort of items from old Cloud Giant civilization. These ancient items could be sold for a profit, if you can induce the balloon whales to vomit them up. Flint was bereft of crew and offered the party a ride to Virid and a share in the treasure for their help. The party agreed.

Flint instructed the party in the use of  the net gun to fire the net and reel in the beasts, and the "ticklers" (long poles with leather covered padding on the end) which is used to poke and stroke the balloon whale ribs to make this disgorge the treasure.  Finally, he requested one of them server as "the diver" to potentially fish stuck items out of the very mouths of the balloon whales.

Soon, they sight one of the creatures and the hunt was on. The creature looks like a plump, giant manatee with a sad looking almost human face (not unlike a blobfish). They manage to get a haul of weird gold tokens or nonmetallic coins out of the first one.

Flint also has a musical instrument that looks uncannily like an older version of Kully's. Flint says it was given to him by a guy named Drue. Kully does an experiment by scratching a mark inside his instrument, then later he examines Flint's and finds it on the inside!

After a couple of hauls, they hear a thunderous bellowing, which Flint hypothesizes might be the Giant Shepherd of the Night Skies. This being supposedly claims the balloon whales, but Flint has never seen him. Sure enough, an ebon giant whose skin seems marked with stars and nebula comes stalking across the sky. He throws an ice storm at the ship, forcing it to drop precipitously. The party attacks with spells, but the giant seems unfazed. Flint dives and soon they are beneath the clouds and the giant is far behind.

After stopping to effect repairs, the ship arrives in the Virid capital the following day. The party is confused, when all they seem is a vast lack, but Flint tells them its below the magical waters, and they dive down...

TO BE CONTINUED

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 2 pt 1)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around March 19, 1981.

Action Comics #520: Conway and Swan don't bring in yet another alien menace, at least. Eric Burton, some superstar tech-entrepreneur, has his sights on Lois Lane, and he's using his money and technology to make sure Superman is distracted by every event on Earth that might need his intervention. Burton isn't causing the events, he's just making sure Superman knows about them, and the Man of Steel can't resist helping. In the end, Lois needs help and Burton shows his cowardice while Superman saves the day. Not a great story, but I think there's a kernel of something interesting here regarding Superman's sense of duty.

The Aquaman backup by DeMatteis/Heck comes to an end (that's even the title). Aquaman and the robot Poseidon with his dad's mind go to confront his crazy mom. She throws a bunch of robots at him in the form of his foes, highlighting how obscure most of Aquaman's rogue's gallery are. In the end, her sister shows up and reveals Aquaman isn't the prophesized one. Atlanna sees the error of her ways and says she's sorry, then destroys herself and the robots. Aquaman opines that as far as he's concerned, this parents were gone a long time ago, practically stating outright that this storyline will be ignored in the future.

Adventure Comics #482: The villains come and go pretty quick in whatever town Vicky and Chris live in! Well, I guess the first one, Interchange, is attacking Washington, D.C., but that still puts 2 super-villians in their at-best medium-sized city. There's Silversmith (with the power to coat things in silver), and the H.I.V.E. assassin Blademaster. Various rookie mistakes bring Chris's cop dad ever closer to figuring out the two are someone related to the superheroes that all show up only once.

Brave & the Bold #175: Batman teams up with Lois Lane to fight Metallo with Jim Aparo on art. Lois might not be the perfect partner to take on a villain with a Kryptonite heart, but they get the job done in the end. Not a bad issue, but far from standout.

In the Nemesis backup by Burkett and Spiegle, Nemesis teams up with the Scotland Yard guy as they figure out the bad guy is playing a chess game with all his kidnappings, and his ultimate target is the Queen.

Green Lantern #141: Wolfman and Staton introduce the Omega Men. Jordan and Carol Ferris go for a campout since they've both lost their jobs at Ferris with her father's return to a more active role. In the woods, they run across the Omega Men. These guys are played more antagonistically in this first encounter than I'm used to seeing them. Also, I never really thought about it, but most of this initial group have an animal-based schtick: tiger, reptile, and bird.  

House of Mystery #293: I..Vampire is back by DeMatteis and Sutton. Bennett and his sidekicks are still on the trail of the Blood Red Moon and attend a rally by racist politician Q.B. Stonewall. He's denounced by a Black Senator, Olive, whose house is later set on fire by the KKK. Bennett is sure Stonewall is a vampire (though he doesn't see the red crescent mark on Olive), but Stonewall is dead. It turns out his assistant is the vampire, but before Bennett can strike, his friend Dmtri stops him. The assistant is his mother!

In the opening story by Conway and Tuska/Celardo, a dead man's dog pesters a gravedigger until the man follow's the dog. He hear the deceased's son confess to the dog's master's murder. The dog was guided in these actions by his master's ghost. "The Senior Sin!" by Ms. Charlie Seegar and Tenny Henson has two young hoodlums who like to prey on the elderly getting cursed by the people whose deaths they've cause to age prematurely, then they are murdered by other young punks.

Legion of Super-Heroes #276: I'm embarrassed today say, I didn't catch the hint regarding the villain of this issue in the title "Lord Romdur's Castle." Conway has the team on of those Medieval worlds the 30th Century seems to have, and they go to check out this villainous Lord Romdur who turns out to be Mordru! (See, Romdur is an anagram for Mordru.) The art by Ditko and Chiaramonte seems mostly phoned in. The cover by Buckler and Giordano is the best part of the issue.

Marvel Super-Heroes with Step Dice

I got a set of those unusual DCC polyhedrals this weekend just for the hell of it, and I was musing on Discord how you could replicate the MSHRPG rankings (Feeble to Unearthly) with a complete set of those dice, like this: Fe (d4), Pr (d5), Ty (d6), Gd (d7), Ex (d8), Rm (d10), In (d12), Am (d14), Mn (d16), Un (d20).

I suppose switching to that sort of mechanic would allow you to ditch the action table, but but keeping something even loosely approximate to the success percentages of the actual game would probably be complicated enough to require one, as shown here:

If you didn't care about sticking as closely as possible to Marvel's percentages (and admittedly, even with this, you've had to give up on the chance of a red success for lower scores) then you could give flat roll thresholds: 4 for green, 7 for yellow, and 10 for red.

I don't actually think there is any reason to do this, but it was amusing to think about.

Pulp Sci-Fi Technology

Star Wars (and to a lesser extent Star Trek) are products of their respective eras in regard to the futuristic technology then portray (or don't feature), but both are also probably beholden to their pulp antecedents and the imagine (and failures of imagination) of the authors that wrote them.

While I won't claim to have made an exhaustive study, here are some things I've noticed about the technology of the retro-future, supplemented by things noticed by Marcus L. Rowland in his excellent Forgotten Futures rpg Planets of Peril based on the works of Stanley Weinbaum, and by GURPS Ultratech 2.

• Radium: Radium seems almost sort of unobtanium in a lot of old stories, an is imbued with uses and properties it doesn't really possess in real life. This goes along with...
• Radiation: Various sorts of radiation (or even sometimes a vaguer property called "vibration" of matter or energy) can do almost magical things. This continues in science fiction, of course, but by the Atomic Age the language used to describe it much less mystical.
• Mechanical not Electronic: One can hardly fault writers of the 20s-40s for not including many (or often any) computers in their works, beyond the occasional mechanical brain, but it's interesting how even the electrical devices appear sparingly, outside of things like visiplates/visiphones (visual communication devices). Some more planetary romance leaning authors like Leigh Brackett, tend to describe virtually none of this sort of technology. This has implications we might not think of: Edmond Hamilton's stories for instance have no jail cells with coded keypads or even simply push button keypads like Star Trek. All his futuristic locks seem to require a hand held "vibratory key."
• Planet and ship based: Artificial satellites and space stations are very rare. In fact, I don't think I've read a story written before the 50s that had them.
• Acquired not Synthesized: Many more breakthrough materials or pharmaceuticals are harvested from alien worlds that made in the laboratory. Even breakthrough laboratory discovers often require some exotic "natural" material.
• Solitary Inventor: Great scientific leaps from space travel to super-weapons are typically the province of single geniuses or experimenters, not teams of government or industry-funded scientists. First space travel is almost always mentioned as a work of a sort of Wright Brothers instead of a NASA.
• Atomic Energy: Everything is atomic powered it seems like.
• No TV: I'm sure there are stories that make reference to something like television as an entertainment medium, but it appears in very few stories. 

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 1 pt 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around March 5, 1981.

Justice League of America #191: As established in previous issues, Zatanna is losing her powers, so she calls on the Atom or help. Why he was the guy to call, I don't know, but let's just go with it. Suddenly though, all the members of the JLA begin to experience the loss of power. The culprit is Amazo, reactivated against his will by the Key, who's stealing the Leagues energies for his own use and to cure the Key of his freakish dwarf body state. In the end, Zatanna shows compassion and cures the Key with some of her magic. She reveals to the Atom her power loss wasn't caused by the Key and is apparently permanent. 

Not a bad issue, but it leaves me with the impression the whole "Zatanna is losing her powers" bit was all just a means by which Conway could reduce her powers, perhaps because he buys into the whole "magic is too powerful because it can do anything" idea that shows up in comics fandom and writers from time to time.

New Teen Titans #8: This is a Claremontian :each character does their own thing and deals with their own stuff" slice of life sort of issue. Starfire starts modeling jeans with Donna Troy as her photographer, and we meet Donna's beau, Terry. Cyborg meets some kids with prosthetics at the park and plays ball them. It's all pretty well-paced and well-done. With this sort of story, I can see how New Teen Titans developed the reputation it did for being different and better than a lot of comics in its era. This sort of thing is common place now, and it devolved into soap opera at best and treading water at worst in X-men from late era Claremont on. But this is 1981 not '91, and it feels fairly fresh. 

Secrets of Haunted House #37: The cover story by Wessler, von Eeden and Smith has a tipi-dwelling (in the modern day) Native American shaman using magic to turn the tables on an unscrupulous developer bent on murder. A bit better is the story by Charlie Seegar and Barretto/Colletta where a conman charms an old widow but not her adopted daughter. In the end, he discovers his bride is really a pet canary transformed into the semblance of the demonic young girl's deceased caregiver. The girl transforms the conman into a bird, too, so he can be with his new wife forever. In a "weird western" tale by Kashdan and Estrada, a frontier doctor removes a bullet from the arm of a young man, only to find it's silver, and he's saved the life of a werewolf.  

In the Mister E story by Rozakis and Spiegle, Kelly returns to the Old Country to help out her aunt who has been thrown in a psychiatric hospital. Mister E mysteriously shows up there, too. It's a good thing, because Kelly's aunt isn't mentally ill, she's being menaced by a leprechaun. Mister E threatens the little guy into leaving her alone.

Superman #360: Yet another story with another group of aliens that we will never see again making an attack on Superman in some indirect way. In this case, making Clark Kent forget he and Superman are the same person. How long has it been since we've have a bona fide super-villain in this title? Either the writers or editorial think Supes' rogues gallery is played, which may be a defensible point, but they seldom replace it with anything worthwhile. I feel like Action is the better of the Superman titles at this time, though neither are spectacular.

The backup is by Rozakis and Saviuk/Colletta is a World of Krypton story. WoK stories have a sort of charm because they tend to accentuate what a crazy place Krypton was. In this story a boy and his father find an odd stone in a river that gives off energy. Unfortunately, it's getting this energy from the sun, absorbing all the sunlight in the day and releasing energy at night. It's destroying Krypton's ecosystem and the Kryptonians don't know how to stop it, until the kid that found it just feeds it to a metal-eater beast in the forest.

Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #2: "Defeat" is an apt title for this Empire Strikes Back installment of the limited series that sees the Guardians defeated by Nekron and the Corps, despite doing well against Krona's troops, defeated by the Maltusian himself. Hal Jordan is the last to fall, but it all seems pretty hopeless. The Barr plot and Wein script seems much more modern than a lot of stuff from this era. The realm of Nekron is reached through a fleshy hole or necrotic lesion in the universe. Staton's design or Nekron is kind of modern, too.

Weird War Tales #100: The main event of this issue is the Creature Commandos getting a little War That Time Forgot action, courtesy of Barr and Hall/Ordway. It's an action-packed tale that reveals the some total of Hall's knowledge of dinosaurs likely comes from King Kong (1933). Their orange and magenta hides probably don't help verisimilitude either. Anyway, in the end, the Creature Commandos act to stop the U.S. military from exploiting the dinos like they've been exploited. 

There's a silly one-pager by Snyder and von Eeden/Breeding where a solider cracks under pressure, only to be revealed to be an actor on a set. The last story is a pretty good one by John David Warner and Vic Catan Jr. In feudal Japan, two scavengers are robbing the dead on battlefields which earns them the ire of Death and a samurai army of living dead. They are pressed into service, but manage to make it out alive. No sooner do they promise not to meddle in the affairs of the Spirit Realms again than they are planning to hock stolen demon masks. 

Wonder Woman #280: I was wondering where Conway was going with the cult storyline, but apparently he was going to appearances by Klarion, Witch-Boy and the Demon, so I'm satisfied with that. Klarion is behind the cult, to what purpose we don't yet know, but clearly he wasn't giving the head of the Delphi Group use of his legs again out of a sense of altruism. Wonder Woman, who realizes she's out of her depth after fighting a demon, gets help from Mother Juju. She refers the Amazon Princess to Jason Blood, but it's the Demon who's eager to take on the forces of darkness. 

In the backup, Huntress has her showdown with Lionmane. The Huntress triumphs in the end, and we learn she had a score to settle since Lionmane had given her mother, Catwoman, a severe beating years ago. While all this is going on, the Huntress's love interest falls victim to the Joker.

World's Finest Comics #269: This issue is pretty good. Conway and Buckler/McLaughlin have Batman buried alive by a crook, and Superman and Robin must race against time to save him--or to show up after he saved himself, because he's Batman. Batman's escape is well done, but Superman's power gets a bit diminished to make the story work. Haney and von Eeden/Breeding have Oliver Queen chasing down a lead about drug smugglers on a fictional Caribbean island, and Green Arrow becomes involved after saving an attractive woman (obviously very attractive, Arrow keeps talking and thinking about it for several pages) from a crook. It turns out the woman's ploy to save her brother is a con, but GA was never fooled. Rozakis, Saviuk and Rodriguez deliver the best segment so far in this Hawkman/Hawkgirl arc, as the winged wonders return to Thanagar so Shayera can save Katar from the bite of a mutant insect in the not very good early parts of this story. The Shazam! family segment by Bridwell and Newton/Adkins has Captain Marvel Jr. defeating Sabbac. 

The Red Tornado story is probably the issue's low point, but even that isn't so low. RT is looking for a tool he needs to repair himself so he doesn't fall apart and winds up saving the owner of an electronic store who is being held captive by Marxist terrorists led by Madame Redclaw (who must have inspired the DCAU villain Red Claw). Conway has this goofy thing of having the terrorists make Communist revolutionary sort of statements, only to have them immediately shown to be wrong. 

A Game I Would Like to Have Seen

Logan's Run may have come out a bit too early for an rpg tie-in, but it seems like the sort of thing FASA would have got a hold of if anybody did.

I think the setting has a lot of rpg potential, particularly as developed in the TV series.

Weird Revisited: The Life Aquatic

This post first appeared in 2011...

A merman and his landwoman bride.  Grand Lludd, 5825.

In the waters west of Ibernia, ship passengers occasionally glimpse and wonder at light in the depths. These are the lights Undersea, municipality of the mer-folk. Part of the empire of Grand Lludd, the citizens of Undersea have never been Her Preserved Majesty’s most loyal servants. Only the threat of submarine bombardment has stifled open rebellion at times. Still, in these hard years following the Great War, land and sea need each other too much for such squabbles.

The mer-folk are not to be confused with mermaids, despite similarity in names. Those half-fish creatures (and wholly nonhuman, whatever their appearance) are more akin to faerie. Mer-folk look, for the most part, like surface humans except for a slight bluish tint to their skin, eyes a little larger than usual, webbed hands, and a slight tendency to barrel-chestedness--though its common for portrayals of them in art to exaggerate their inhumanness. So little apparent difference for beings naturally inhabiting great depths and pressures hint at the subtle magics that have been used to adapt them to a submarine life. Scientists suggest this points to them being an engineered race, perhaps derived from Meropian stock. Mer-folk find this whole line of speculation dull, and are largely unconcerned with their own origins.

Perhaps its this lack of curiosity, among other traits, that has led to the common Lluddish stereotype of Mer-folk as thickwitted. They're also held to quick-tempered and lascivious (a judgement perhaps derived from their indifferent attitude toward clothing--at least in the seas). Mer-folk don’t drink (at least not in their usual habitat) but their men tend to enjoy licking certain sea slugs for an intoxicant effect, and singing (it can be called that) gurgling, warbling shanties, while their women perform suggestive, water ballet-like dances.

Though they are limited in the areas of metallurgy, chemcal, and alchemical sciences, the mer-folk are not utter primitives.  They use magic to shape stone for buildings, and have either used animal husbandry or magic to enhance the abilities of sea creatures for their use.  The lantern jellyfish sometimes seen in aquariums are best known example. 

On land, mer-folk must wear something like reverse diving suits--pressurized suits filled with water--unless they have access to magic aid. They're able to breath air, but the exertion quickly tires them and it's uncomfortable for more than a half-hour or so. Their skin quickly dries out in air, as well.  The use of heavy suits isn't as cumbersome as it might seem as mer-folk are stronger than a surface human of comparable size.

There are some mer-folk enclaves in the New World. The largest of these are in New Lludd, there mer-folk are involved in fishing, and the Southron coast where they engage in sponge harvesting, as well.

Constraints & Creativity

Occasionally, after I do a post on science fiction limited only to the Solar System or single country settings or the like, I get somebody commenting that seems too small or too limiting a space for them. In a similar vein, I feel like settings or games that provide a lot of options for PCs are lauded whereas limiting options for characters is viewed in a negative light.

People are free to like what they like, of course, but I don't agree with these complaints for the most part. Every setting or game excludes as many things (or more) as it includes in how it defines itself. Even kitchen sink or gonzo settings have parameters and boundaries. Game systems themselves constrain with their rules. 

There is obviously some give and take here. A GM who wants to run a D&D setting with more than the usual restrictions on options should communicate that and probably the reasons for it before hand, but armed with that knowledge, players ought to trying to make up characters that would fit the setting and negotiating with the GM regarding parameters. Honestly, I feel like I've had just as much fun playing a well-defined pregen than making up my own character, at least for short-run games.

I'm hardly the first to note this, but it seems to me constraint can stimulate creativity. It's true on the player side, but I think it's also true on the GM/setting creation side. With an large number of worlds to play with, it should be a trivial matter coming up with interesting planets, but the Star Wars franchise seems to have a tough time showing us anything but the same three or four biomes over and over. And most of those are are one biome: deserts, but perhaps that's a different problem. I don't think Star Wars is the only franchise that lets quantity substitute for quality. It's easy to do.

But If you've got a smaller number of worlds like a solar system, you've got to make every one count, and you might well use each one to it's fullest. Maybe they aren't all single biome planets, but even if they are, you would tend to have them have different sorts of jungle or different sorts of deserts to get the most out of it. All of that is creativity you would never have been forced to exercise if you had a bunch of planets to spare.

Maybe its just me. Try it for yourself, by self-imposing some constraints you wouldn't normal give yourself in worldbuilding or adventure design and see how it turns out.

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 1 pt 1)

I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! I'm a couple of days later than my usual Wednesday post, but I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of  March 5, 1981. 

Batman #336: After Wolfman's lackluster al Ghul arc, Rozakis/Thomas bring us a much better done-in-one story with Garcia-Lopez art to sweeten the deal. The obscure 60s villain, the Monarch of Menace, has convinced various C-grade Gotham criminals (several other minor characters from over the years) that he has captured Batman and they should pay him to keep the Caped Crusader locked up. Batman, as we know, has only been out of the country, and now that he's back he starts taking these mooks down, including the Monarch. This reminded me a bit of Mike Barr/Alan Davis run on Detective after Crisis, which I liked a lot.

DC Comics Presents #34: The Superman/Marvel Family team-up continues, and in true Roy Thomas fashion we even get obscure Marvel family members like Uncle Marvel and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. No Hilly-billy Marvel, though. Buckler/Giordano might not be the go-to team for the Marvel Family, but they make it work. The team-up of Mxyzptlk, Mr. Mind, and King Kull  have managed to take out the wizard Shazam and make King Kull more powerful than all the Marvels and Superman, but their alliance crumbles when the other two have more bloodthirsty aims than Mxy, and being villains, they tend to want to insult each other rather than compromise. A fun issue. Better than the first part.

Flash #298: The storyline with Barry's parents continues from last issue. You know what? Infantino's art of this era is made a lot better by Bob Smith's inks. Central City is being plagued by periods when everything is drained of color. Flash suspects the Rainbow Raider may be responsible, but he's in prison painting away. Shade shows up from Earth-Two to ask for the Flash's help. He reveals that every time Central City goes black and white Keystone City gets much more colorful. The story ends with Rainbow Raider gloating in his thoughts regarding his coming triumph. Also, this issue features two truly creepy panels of Barry's dad grinning like a maniac, and in the second of these he's holding up Flash's costume and saying he knows just how many days the Flash has to live.

The Firestorm backup has him still fighting Multiplex, but since Ronnie was unconscious when Firestorm was formed, Stein is in charge and things don't go so well. Firestorm is captured, but he manages to escape and manipulates power cables to drain Multiplex, causing him to recombine.

Ghosts #101: We get extra Dr. 13 this month to make up for the lack last month, and I have give it to Kupperberg and Bender: it's better than a gladiator's ghost. Thirteen is recovering in the hospital after the events of #99 (which I don't remember him being injured, but ok. The caption says he got there last issue, but he wasn't even in last issue!). Turns out the hospital appears to be haunted by the ghost of a Haitian contractor that died during construction, but of course, Thirteen doesn't believe it. He and an orderly who gives his name as "Mad Dog" are on the case! It involves a Haitian voodoo cabal using a drug to fake heart attacks and make people appear dead, only in the case of this contractor he fell off the roof and actually died. At a crucial moment, his ghost may have save Mad Dog and Thirteen, but of course, Thirteen is unconvinced.

In the last story by Kashdan and Landgraf/Colletta, thieves shoot down a plane with a bazooka to steal the payroll it was carrying. They hide the loot in a cave, but then one of them gets greedy and murders the other. He's chased by the ghost of his former partner until he runs into some cultist types in robes. They force him to participate in a séance where his victim's spirit reveals his guilt. Then they declare him evil incarnate like them and demand he stay. Later a group is taking a guided tour of the Cave of the Cult of Darkness (sure, I guess that could happen.) where the cult supposedly hid out "100 years ago" and is perplexed by an additional skeleton at the cult's table wearing modern clothes.

G.I. Combat #230: The Haunted Tank stories this issue may be worse than usual. One has Kanigher making his already problematic romanticism worse with a story about a battle of "brave banners" where a German tank commander flying the Nazi flag goes up against the Haunted Tank and its stars and bars. The other yarn is actually not bad, it's just completely ridiculous. The crew leaves the European Theater on a special mission to South East Asia where they join up with some Chinese fighters. They wind up having to use a gunboat like an improvised tank, rolling it along a track of logs and--well, I think that's enough on that, really. Read it yourself if you want more.

The O.S.S. story opens with the replacement of a German officer with a duplicate having gone off successfully. The only problem is the O.S.S. has sent an assassin to kill that officer, and he won't know about the switch! Before the assassin can strike, the real officer escapes. The assassin faces the man and his doppelgänger, not knowing which is which. The French agent saves himself by saying a Hebrew prayer for the dead. The Women At War segment by Laurie and Vicatan has a nurse thrown off a torpedoed troop ship pulling some soldiers into a raft, fighting off a shark attack, then diving to throw a grenade into a Japanese sub's torpedo tube. In a story by Newman and Matucenio, an Italian American G.I. gets to visit the village where he was born and help them fight off the Germans. It's interesting  that the period these war comics stories tend to take place in obscures the fact Italy was an Axis power. They aren't necessarily inaccurate in their portrayal, necessarily, but reading them you  just never know. Kashdan and Henson round out the issue with a short, goofy story about a entomologically obsessed G.I. whose obsession saves his sergeant's life.

Jonah Hex #48: Hex and his bride are really making a go of the farm life and have just gotten in their corn crop in for market, but Hex is careless with a still-burning cigarillo. The crop and their barn go up in flames. In order to get the money they need to pay their mortgage, Hex returns to bounty hunting, but lies to Mei Ling about what he is going to do. Her anger at him is preempted by her finding out she is pregnant. Their disagreements forestalled once again, they vow to make it work.

In the backup, we get Bat Lash by Wein and Spiegle, and it's a nice little story. Bat Lash wins the deed to a social club in New Orleans in a crooked (though he doesn't know it) poker game on a riverboat headed down the Mississippi. The man who had tried to fix the game to win that deed sends men to kill Bat to get it. He outsmarts them, but the lady dealer from the poker game suggests a romantic interlude which Bat Lash is quite willing to indulge in--right before she steals the deed and pushes him off the boat.

A Decade of Weird Adventures

I realized this past weekend that I had missed Weird Adventures' tenth anniversary on December 15, 2021. We are also not too far away from the twelfth anniversary of my introduction of the City on my blog on April 18, 2010.

Blogging about that setting was where my blog really took off, to the extend that it did. While Strange Stars eventually proved to be the more popular setting, at least in terms of sales, I've always felt like Weird Adventures was the more unique setting. While Bloodshadows had been around since 1994 with a combination of high fantasy and noir,  I think Weird Adventures works I bit differently, drawing form not just surface level noir or pulp conceits, but a whole host of early to mid-20th Century pop cultural material. Weird Adventures could sort of do Cast A Deadly Spell, but it's just as much Thimble Theater and Wellman's Silver John stories and American folk- and fakelore--plus whatever period pop cultural ephemera I came across at the moment.

In the past few years, I've been recycling some older posts on my blog, but I've mostly been avoiding Weird Adventures posts because the book exists and an index linked from the blog main page. I think I will start revisiting some of my favorite posts from that series, though, particularly ones with material that didn't make it into the book.

The Books of Babel

I recently finished reading The Books of Babel tetralogy by Josiah Bancroft. The series was so engaging I plowed through them all, only taking a brief intermission between books two and three to read Watts' Blindsight. The Books of Babel are Steampunkish fantasy, set in the titular Tower, which is something of Big Dumb Object in science fiction parlance.

The series starts with Senlin Ascends where the schoolmaster of a small seaside town and his new bride get separated on a visit to the Tower. I hesitate to say too much regarding the arc of the series for fear of spoiling it, but suffice to say there are multiple ringdoms of almost Vancian cultural eccentricity, Steampunk technology including "cyberware" supplied by a mystery inventor high up in the Tower, air ship pirates, and secrets to uncover aplenty, including the mystery of what the Brick Layer, the head of the Tower's construction, actually intended as its function.

The series has a fair amount bit of humor and the chapter epigraphs from in-world works are often wry, but the Tower is also a rather cruel and violent place at times. Bancroft's narrative doesn't flinch from this or keep the events at an ironic distance. Besides Tom Senlin, the headmaster, there are a number of other viewpoints characters, most of whom are capable women--though there's also a fastidious stag whose brain has been transplanted to a robotic body. But I said I didn't want to give too much away, didn't I? 

Anyway, the series is well-worth checking out, and I think would give a lot of inspiration for rpgs in addition to being a fine read.

Wednesday Comics: DC, May 1981 (wk 2 pt 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around February 19, 1981. 

Legion of Super-Heroes #275: Conway is joined by Jane this issue so the art is a little better. The amnesiac Ultra Boy is becoming disenchanted with the cutthroat and cruel nature of the pirate crew and his new lover, Captain Frake, but an assault on the pirate base by the Legion brings the conflict to a head sooner than it might have. Ultra Boy begins helping the Legion, but when he takes a blast from the pirates' cannon, the device explodes and Ultra Boy disappears, leading Saturn Girl to conclude he now really is dead, so she doesn't tell the other Legionnaires that she ever suspected he was still alive. Not a terrible story, but it seems kind of pointless if it ends with the Legion in the same place they began.

Detective Comics #502: Conway does better here, accompanied by Newton/Adkins. Julia believes Alfred killed her mother, Mademoiselle Marie, famed resistance fighter. Her proof is that her mother kept repeating his name before she died. Alfred isn't helping his case by refusing to say anything and looking guilty. The group is going to execute him if Batman doesn't do something. Batman escapes to track down the real killer. He again visits Dupre, the French policeman that helped him before. He points Batman to the last person to speak with Marie alive. The old woman is in the hospital, but she gives Batman a bullet supposedly from the gun that killed Marie and tells him their was a traitor in Marie's resistance cell. Dupre surprises Batman, revealing that he was that traitor, but Batman is playing possum and captures him. He turns over Dupre and the bullet to Julia and the others, and Alfred is freed. In the end, the reader learners what Batman has already figured out: Julia is Alfred's daughter with Marie, and he has been supporting her, but doesn't want her to know the truth.

Burkett and Delbo continue the adventures of Batgirl in the backup. She overcomes her fears and defeats Dr. Voodoo in a buy-the-numbers yarn.

New Adventures of Superboy #17: Clark's classmate Moosie gives a speech in class arguing they shouldn't be so impressed with Superboy since he's never been tested against a truly super-powered opponent. Clark takes this to heart and designs a super-villain from one of his robots to beat him up all over town.  Then this Kator winds up taking his role a little too seriously. Bates though this story was worthy of a two-parter. The backup is a mildly humorous Krypto tale by Rozakis and Calnan where the dog of steel must go to the vet for shots, but manages to avoid that and catch some criminals looking to dope a race horse. 

Sgt. Rock #352: Kanigher and Redondo are back with one of their heavily-hammered theme stories. Rock and Easy keep running into other units asking the combat happy joes to "buy them more time" as they've been bloodied by German aircraft and need time to regroup before the ground assault. Rock and his crew take a forward position in a bombed out town, but after an assault by scouting party of Germans, Rock sends wounded Easy back to be treated while he holds the line, solo! When it looks out he's done for, Easy comes riding to the rescue, then all the units they had helped.

The Men of Easy feature by Kanigher and Mandrake "Winter Soldier" (heh) focuses on the Ice Cream Soldier. He likes ice cream so much he'll eat snow. That's about it. Then there's a story by Mandrake which is really more a Weird War Tale: A Roman soldier on the Antonine Wall. Oppressing the Picts, he stumbles into a fairy ring and gets transported to present day. The final story is a completely forgettable Civil War tale with art by Duursema.

Super Friends #44: Bridwell and Tanghal have the Justice League all forgetting their super-identities. The Wonder Twins are captured by the alien responsible, but manage to wake the Super Friends up by activating their JLA signal devices. The heroes battle the alien's troops who have transformed into alien monster bodies with the heads of JLA members.  The backup is a Bridwell and Tanghal story of Jack O'Lantern. He catches a hit man who's happened to choose to disguise himself as the hero's uncle.

Unexpected #210: The cover story by Kashdan and Jodloman is the sort of ridiculous high concept I can appreciate. A town sees a vampire ape (!) attacking a guy, and tracks it to its lair and stake it, only to be informed by its scientist-creator that the vampire ape fed only on vampire. It was the only thing protecting the town from the depredations of the local Count and his brood. Kashdan follows that up with an EC-esque Timewarp yarn with art by Vicatan. In a totalitarian future society, a dissident chooses mysterious exile over execution. Her lover pines for her so, he commits a crime to take the same exile. He arrives on an alien world transformed to a sexless, grinch-looking wretch. He's been changed for the conditions of the world--and so has all the other exiles including his formerly lovely girlfriend.

Laurie Sutton and Brozowski/Mitchell deliver a slight tale about a mummy possibly moving around a museum at night and spooking the security guard. Finally, there's the latest installment of the Johnny Peril serial, now with Trevor von Eeden art. I'll just hit the highlights here: There's a "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" riff with creatures sent by the baddie to tear up the plane Johnny and friends are in. Then, a psychic is possessed by the enemy, but Johnny talks her down. In the cliffhanger he flies off solo and the plane crashes.

Warlord #45:  Read more about it here. The OMAC backup by Mishkin/Cohn and LaRocque/Colletta  is a story that could come from a script by Starlin. It even has an extradimensional sequence in a deadly funhouse that it's easy to see in the style of Starlin doing a Ditko homage, but the art is rough to the point of appearing amateurish.

Weird Revisited: The Wild Wood

This post first appeared in March of 2011. This material didn't make it into Weird Adventures...

 

One tragic loss of the Great War was the area of Grand Lludd known as Wild Wood. Covering a hundred acres of farm and woodland, it was the home of various species of anthropomorphic animals. Now much of the land has been despoiled, and most of its inhabitants have been killed or displaced.

These creatures were the product of biothaumaturgy and the eccentric genius of one man, Gaspard Mauro. Mauro gained the support of the crown in his endeavors by promising applications of his techniques in creating servitors to free mankind from hazardous labors.

His work never amounted to more than a curiosity.  Still, the Queen herself was quite fond of them, and on the occasion of her eighty-ninth birthday had a group of the animal-folk perform for her. There is one wax-cylinder recording said to exist of their cheerful, high-pitched singing.

Most of the animal-folk appear to have died in bombing during the war. There is evidence that some burrowing species may have survived, and there are worrisome reports that rats, taken to Communalitarianism, may have absconded with some of Mauro's notes, and are now undertaking a program of evolution and revolution among the rodent underclass of several cities.

Blake's 7

 

Something we read online last week prompted a brief discussion on Discord regarding the British science fiction series Blake's 7 (1978-1981). The show involves a political dissident (the titular Blake) leading a small group of escaped prisoners turned rebels (the titular 7) against the forces of the totalitarian Terran Federation. I don't know anything much more about the setting or how the plot plays out than that, having only seen the first episode years ago on PBS, but I think the concept has plenty of rpg potential.

There's nothing wrong with the set-up as is with the serial numbers filed off. The comic book series Six From Sirius would be another potential inspiration for this sort of thing--both in plot elements and characters and in 80s sci-fi trappings. I can think of a couple of ways the idea might be tweaked, though.

The first (possibly predictably, since I've done this before) is strip away some of the space opera conventions and have it confined to the solar system with more realistic tech. This becomes a little bit more cyberpunk, I think. It would be darkly dystopian, certainly, but serious or satirical would be possible.

My other though is to retain the galactic scale, but not have the setting be so humanocentric. Borrowing a bit from Farscape, the escaped prisoners might be a motley, mostly alien crew.

Weird Revisited: Rogue Elephant

To adventurers in the City, the question, “have you see the elephant?” has a different meaning than elsewhere. Some have encountered an infamous, wandering hotel in the shape of an elephant, now the residence of a dangerous (and possibly insane) sorcerer.

The Mastodon Colossus, or Hotel Elephantine, was built as a tourist attraction on Lapin Isle in the City’s barony of Rook End. The (admittedly eccentric) architect Jamis Maguffin constructed it through consultation of certain codices of the Ancients--and some magical materials probably dating to Meropis dredged from the City’s harbor. The elephant was twelve stories tall and had stout legs 60 feet in diameter. It had 31 guest rooms, a gallery, tobacconist's shop, and an observation deck shaped like a gigantic howdah.

Most spectacularly, the whole thing was planned to move. Maguffin promised that when all of the thaumaturgic glyphs and enhancements were complete, the elephant would be able to ambulate without any seeming change to the rooms on its interior. These enhancements, unfortunately, would take some time.

Eleven years later, when the thaumaturgical working was (supposedly) nearly complete, the elephant walked away one night with a compliment of guests. Most have turned up dead in various locales all over the world and beyond in the four decades since.

The theft and the murders were laid at the feet of Hieronymus Gaunt, lich and (self-styled) wicked sorcerer. He and a band of miscreants entered the elephant and completed the rituals to give in motion. Since that time they've travelled the world in decadent style, taking their seemingly unending orgy of dark thaumaturgy, baroque perversity, and deadly amusements where they may. Sometimes, when it amuses Gaunt, they take others aboard and survivors have reported stores of plunder, both mundane and magical.

This post first appeared in February of 2011. I did a post on the real elephant-shaped buildings of our world after it. You can also read more about them at your local library. Or, you know, the internet.

Wednesday Comics: DC, May 1981 (wk 2 pt 1)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around February 19, 1981.

Action Comics #519: A deep sea listening station in the desert is the site of a conflict between an alien hunter and a monster that destroyed his world. Again Conway provides story free of an real sense of peril and whose action seems staid under Swan's pencils.

The Aquaman backup by DeMatteis/Heck continues. Here we get the strange history of Aquaman's mother, which I suspect was ignored after this story, from the Poseidon android who has a replica of the mind of Aquaman's father. Atlanna was one of the original survivors of Atlantis. She became immortal thanks to a serum of her creation. After her supposed death following Aquaman's birth, she apparently went crazy. She hates the Atlantis that exiled her, and now wants to kill her own son who is prophesized to be it's savior.

Adventure Comics #481: More stories of heroes (and villains) submitted by the readers. This issue has a series of stories connected by the escalating machinations of an aquatic alien species looking to conquer Earth. A flood hits the city, but Goldman, Goldgirl and Alchemiss are there to help. Chris' father, a cop, begins to become suspicious of the new heroes. Then, Chris and Vicki have a near-romantic moment interrupted by an attack by the Destructress, a delusional young woman turned into a super-villain by the aquatic aliens. They become Sixth Sensor and Dimension Girl to stop her. Finally, the aliens send Largo the Conqueror. Volcano and Stellar defeat him and send the aliens packing. I'm not usually a fan of Infantino's art in this era, but his rendering of Largo is good.

Brave & the Bold #174: Batman, Green Lantern, and the Guardian arrive on Maltus, the ancient home of the Guardian's ancestors. There, GL is reunited with Appa Ali Apsa (though he isn't named this issue) who was made mortal by the Guardians as punishment. They bring the "Old Timer" back with them to Oa to help them discover which of the Guardians is Sinestro in disguise. Ultimately, Sinestro's temper unmasks him. While Batman and Old Timer avoid him, Green Lantern marshals the Corps to defeat the renegade and the Guardians he's using as a battery. Conway is pretty good at these team-ups, and Aparo's art is an added bonus.

In the Nemesis backup by Burkett and Spiegle, Nemesis escapes from the police officer trying to take him in and continues to try to foil Chesterton's plot. He figures out the kidnappings are chess themed, but things are complicated by Valerie getting into trouble. 

Green Lantern #140: Wolfman, Staton and Mitchell finish up their storyline regarding the kidnapping of the Ferrises. Either it's a trait of Wolfman's or a trait of how comics were written in this era, but the "arc" doesn't have any particularly big payoff. The kidnapper who's trying to ruin the Ferris family is Bloch, an old business partner who believes Ferris stole the business from him. Later, he was horribly burned in an attempt to sabotage a Ferris experimental jet. Aiding him are his sons, one of whom is a sleazy Congressman. None of these folks are particularly significant or compelling adversaries for Green Lantern as yet. Bloch dies for his efforts, but his son in Congress vows vengeance. 

The Adam Strange backup is passable planetary romance. Strange succeeds in helping the mer-person queen stop the automated battleship that was menacing her people. It turns out the robot they met last issue was a little boy wearing power armor. I kind of like that Sutton doesn't explain who the boy is or how he got there, though does have Strange pose those questions in the story.

House of Mystery #292: I..Vampire is nowhere to be seen this issue, but we get better than average anthology tales. The first story by Cavalieri with art by Mark Silvestri (his first for DC or anybody) and Tony DeZuniga is probably the weakest, but only due to unexploited potential. A general plans to use an orphaned child with the ability to manipulate reality a weapon against the U.S.'s enemies, but when the child seems poised to smash a globe in a temper tantrum, it could mean the end of the world instead. There's the gesture at a subplot here involving a doctor taking care of the boy having lost her son in Vietnam, but it goes nowhere.

"The Wendigo" by Kelly and Estrada has some interesting art, particularly in the creature design. A young boy living in a rural area befriends a Wendigo and uses it to get rid of people who've angered him. After depopulating the nearby town, he sends it to the big city following a skeptical reporter. "Hair Apparent" by Conway and Spiegle has the scion of the Briarly family breaking with family tradition and marrying someone besides a cousin. When the familial lycanthropy curse hits, his new wife uses a spell to turn herself into a werewolf rather than live without her husband.

Unknown Soldier #251: Haney and Ayers take us first to the snowy Pyrenees with the Unknown Soldier caught between Spanish fascists and Nazis Then he has to fight a bear. He's there to bring back a German Abbot form a remote monastery whose brother is a resistance fighter the Allies wish to get out of Germany. They need the Abbot to help them get to the brother, who otherwise might think it was a trap. Sneaking back into Germany proves difficult, and the Abbot and the Soldier are separated for a while, but reunite in time to meet the brother in a bombed out German city. It turns out the Soldier is actually there to kill him as the Allies believe he has already turned traitor--but it turns out the Abbot was replaced while they were separated by an SS officer! Then the real Abbot shows up and has to decide whether to side with family or ending the Nazi tyranny. In the end, he breaks his nonviolent code and shoots his brother to save the Soldier. In return, the Soldier later retrieves the statue of Mary the Nazis had plundered from the monastery.

We get the first installment of a Enemy Ace backup by Kanigher and John Severin. I like Enemy Ace, but this issue the story is mostly introducing the character and his rigid honor as a Knight of the Air. He takes on the request of a dying enemy to get a bracelet to his twin sister. Unfortunately, the pilot died before he could even say her name. The final story is a short where downed enemy pilots in the Pacific don't fall to each other but to the "eternal sentinel"--a shark.

How Do You Like Your Sci-Fi?

I posed this question this question as the title of a blogpost the irst time on February 15, 2013. It's a topic that TV Tropes--unsurprisingly--has some thoughts on. This scale is a bit granular and more detailed (and perhaps a bit more judgey). Here's my sort of summary of the basics of both of these:

Hard: So, on one end we've got fairly plausible stuff that mostly extrapolates on current technology. This includes stuff like William Gibson's Sprawl series and the novels of Greg Egan (from the near future mystery Quarantine to the far future Diaspora). A game example is this category would be somethig like GURPS Transhuman Space.

Medium: Getting a little more fantastic, we arrive in the real of a lot of TV shows and computer games. One end of this pretty much only needs you to believe in FTL and artificial gravity but is otherwise pretty hard. The fewer impossible things you're asked to believe (and the better rationalized the ones you are asked to believe in are), the harder it is. Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean Le Flambeur trilogy falls here, on the harder end. The middle of this group adds in something like psionics (Traveller gets in here, and a lot of science fiction novels, like Dune and Hyperion). The softer end throws in a lot of too-human aliens and "pure energy" beings (Babylon 5, most Star Trek).

Soft: Here lies fantasy but with a science fiction veneer and context. Some Star Trek (the animated series, particularly) comes in here, and Farscape. This is also the domain of Star Wars. Simon R. Green's Deathstalker cycle turns up here, too.

Ultra-Soft: Some Star Wars tie-ins in other media come in here, as do things that include magic (or similar fantastic elements} mixed in with an otherwise soft sci-fi universe: This would include superhero sci-fi properties (the Legion of Super-Heroes and Guardians of the Galaxy) and comic book epic sci-fi (what might also be thought of as Heavy Metal sci-fi) like Dreadstar, The Incal, and The Metabarons. It's possible it stops beings science fiction on the mushiest end of this catgory and just becomes "fantasy."

So what consistency of sci-fi is your favorite--particularly in regard to rpgs?

Weird Revisited: After the Flood

In October of 2015, we had some historic rainfall and associated flooding in my neck of the woods. It inspired this post...

After a weekend of heavy rain and flooding in this neck of the woods, some uses of floods and their aftermaths in games is on my mind. There's what I've got:

The Lost City: Inundated coastal cities might become lost or at least legendary. Ys is a good example. There's typically a mystery here or at least potent magic. It might be a whole area to explore, or just a bit of weirdness in a campaign.

Looting the Depths: Jesse Bullington's The Folly of the World includes an attempted theft in town submerged by the Saint Elizabeth's Flood of 1421 (the 20th worst flood in history). "Moon fishing" is apparently the term for treasure hunting among the ruins of the towns flooded by China's Three Gorges Dam. Looting underwater would present special challenges for adventurers and a different array of monsters than the usual.

Something Strange Beneath the Surface: You already know about aquatic elves and aquatic trolls, but let's got deeper. In Swamp Thing #38, Alan Moore presents an aquatic mutation of vampires in the submerged town of Rosewood, Illinois. Any monster can have an aquatic variant but the key to making them non-mundane is having them by one-offs in unusual circumstances. The 2021 French horror film Deep House likewise has a supernatural horror continuing beneath the waters of a flooded town.