Warlord Wednesday: The Last Dragon

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"The Last Dragon"

Warlord #127 (March 1988)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Pencils by Jan Duursema, Inks by Tom Mandrake

Synopsis: Believing Tara dead, Morgan has left Shamballah and returned to wandering. After an encounter with a smilodon, followed immediately by an attack by a pack of raptors, Morgan is saved by a masked bowman named Dreadnar. Morgan loses his horse to the raptors, but decides to travel with Dreadnar for a bit.

Meanwhile, Khnathaiti is hiding from Skartaris’s eternal sun in a cave beneath the volcano. Her powers have diminished since the death of the Scavenger, but she manages to suck the life force of a rat to stave off decay. She swears vengeance on the Warlord who reduced her to this.

After acquiring some now horses, Dreadnar leads Morgan to the Vale of the Dragon. Here his people lived for a thousand years, worshipping the dragons that dwelt there and sometimes appeasing them with sacrifices of “unblemished maidens.” One year, the shamans withheld the sacrifice due to a famine, and the dragons attacked. Dreadnar and his elder son returned to the village to find it destroyed.

The two went on a rampage of revenge against the beasts, killing all but one: a female, with eggs. She ambushed them, killing Dreadnar’s son in a blast of fire. Dreadnar escaped with his life, but:

Morgan and Dreadnar come upon some scroungers digging around the remains of Dreadnar’s old village looking for valuables. Dreadnar routs them and would have killed their leader, but Morgan convinces him the rat isn’t worth it. The scoundrels haven’t gotten far when they’re roasted by dragon fire. Morgan and Dreadnar run for it and dive into a nearby lake for protection.

When they come up for air, it seems the danger may have passed. When again:

In the Siberian gulag, an old enemy of Morgan’s, Danny Maddox, watches Mariah be dragged off to be punished after standing up to the sadistic guards. She’s stuck in an unheated cell with no food. Maddox gives her a little gift:

Things to Notice:

• Shakira gets big hair in this issue.
• While it isn't the first time, the dragon in this issue is a "fantasy dragon" rather than a dinosaur like in previous issues.

Where It Comes From:
This issue shares a title with a 1985 film, but there really isn't a relationship between the two.

Danny Maddox first appeared as a young bully in Travis Morgan's hometown back in issue #91. Fleisher brought him back and gave him many more run-ins with Morgan over the course of their lives as depicted in Secret Origins #16 (July 1987), which seems to set-up his appearance here.

Retrofuture Crosssections

So Haynes Publishing has just released Dan Dare: Spacefleet Operations as part of their Owner's Workshop Manual Series, which already includes a couple on ships from Star Trek and one on the Thunderbirds.

While I have only passing familiar with the venerable British science fiction comic book hero, the sample illustrations shown in this article (from which the base above is taken) lead me to believe this manual would be very useful for any pulp sci-fi game.

The Reboot and Its Application

Like a lot of other people, I caught Star Trek: Into Darkness over the weekend. My capsule review: If you liked the first one as you watched it you will probably like this one as you watch it. If you liked the first one, you probably also experienced an increasing irritation with it the more you thought about it in the hours and days that followed. I suspect that will be you experience with this one.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about Into Darkness so much as the application of things like changes continuity in one way or another in rpg settings. Certainly, there are examples of retcons and reboots in published rpg settings; I'm more interested in what people do in their own homemade settings.

I suspect mild retcons are pretty common in long running campaigns. A little change in some aspect of setting when the GM gets a better idea never really hurt anybody--particularly if the PCs haven't even directly interacted with it yet. If they have, it gets a little trickier, but if G+ posts are any indication, settings are sort of continuous works in progress, even well after play starts.

I don't know about anybody else, but I've engaged in wholesale rebooting of one setting for much of my D&D career. The world of Arn (that I started this blog discussing) has elements that go back to junior high, though its gone through 3 map changes, place name changes (and sometimes back again), and conceptual shifts from vaguely backgrounded generic D&D world, detailed pastiche of Leiber, Howard, and Burroughs, synthesis of those S&S elements with whatever historical period I was interested in at the moment (from Ancient Rome to the 16th Century), and so on.

All of these permutations could be seen as just cannibalizing old ideas for economy of imagination, except that some of the same characters and background elements have been consistent pretty much the whole time--though their presentations have changed. The founders of one of the main cities in the world(s), have gone from actual PCs, to historical personages, to likely mythological characters.

Not only does this sort of thing save work, but I think it can allow for some of the depth of background that comes from a long-running campaign without actually having run a continuous campaign for all that time.

Suit Up

art by Simon Roy

EXOSKIN: a vacc suit of programmable matter. An exoskin forms around a wearer as they pass through a suit membrane aperture found before the airlock on a spacecraft. Once a wearer is clear of the membrane, the suit takes only a few seconds to finalize its configuration. Exoskins come in various forms from skintight to bulbous and oversized. They can be programmed to have slightly different properties, including opacity, color, texture, and thickness. They typically have the features and attachments common to other sorts of vacc suits, other than armor. Suit membranes have supplies of programmable matter based on the crew compliment of the ship. Small ones can create 5 suits. Larger ones may be able to create 20 or more with less than a minute in between. [Essentially the same as the Vacc skin in Stars Without Number in game terms.]

The Penitents

They often call themselves “Penitents,” though the rest of the Strange Stars know them as Deodands—if not some other slur. By whatever name, they are a people viewed as cursed and bringers bad luck. They’re marked by their peculiar coloration: white on one side and black on the other, with a sharp division in between. A few try to hide it, but most accept it as a sign of their crimes as a people.

Deodands are believed to have been a prosperous people at the time of the Great Collapse. They were kept safe through the years of crisis that followed by a godlike posthuman mind. At some point, the people that would be the deodands commited some great crime against their god. They were punished with their unusual appearance, but also with a peculiar form of immortality. Any time a deodand dies, a nanomod in their bodies sends a signal via quantum entanglement to some hidden body bank. A copy of the dead person’s mind is downloaded into a new body, which is delivered back to the deodands' home station via a casket-like, adamantine, life support pod falling from a small hyperspace node. Whatever a deodand may accomplish in life, death causes him or her to start over as a naked beggar on streets of their decaying habitat. They remember only that they have lived previously, but only the barest details of their past lives.

While a few may come to view this immortality in a positive light, most do not. A few have tried to find a way to cheat resurrection, but things only seem to prolong the time to resurrection rather than preventing it. Attempts to remove the nanomods only lead to the deodands death. Deodands are incapable of having biological children, and few try any other method.

Each deodand handles their curse differently. Some become extremely repentant and join ascetic or flagellate cults. Others revel in debauchery (the better to show their sinfulness and guilt) and become sybarites or criminals. Most live marginal lives of poverty and substance abuse in their native habitat or elsewhere. None of these groups contribute anything positive to the reputation of their people among other culture.

The few wealthy deodands would pay almost anything to someone willing to end their curse buy finding the source of their unwanted resurrection and shutting it down.

Warlord Wednesday: The Queen is Dead!

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"The Queen is Dead! Long Live The Queen!"

Warlord #126 (February 1988)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Pencils by Jan Duursema, Inks by Tom Mandrake

Synopsis: Machiste, Jennifer, and above all Morgan, grieve Tara’s death, while (in her lair) the evil Khnathaiti laughs. Tara really isn’t dead, merely soulless and in the sorcereress’s thrall. Soon, she will rise and be the plaything of the Scavenger of Souls.

The Scavenger sneaks into Tara’s pyramid tomb:

Meanwhile in Siberia, Mariah is being interrogated by the KGB. They know who she is and how she disappeared at Machu Picchu. They think she’s a CIA spy. Ultimately, she’s dragged off by guards to be “disposed of.”

In Kiro, Tara walks through a barracks full of sleeping guardsmen, stealing their souls as she goes. The soldiers rise and follow here. She enters the kings chamber and awakens Machiste, who at first thinks he’s dreaming. The Scavenger forbids her from taking the king’s soul: He wants it for his own. He grabs Machiste by the throat and begins sapping his soul away. Machiste doesn’t go down that easy:

Machiste tells them both to get the hell out before he gets really angry. They slink away with the souls they have, warning that their mistress’s day is coming.

Sometime later, Machiste bursts into Morgan’s chamber and tells him he’s seen Tara alive. Morgan doesn’t believe it, until Machiste mentions the Scavenger. Morgan, Machiste, and Jennifer go to the cave beneath the volcano. Jennifer leads them through the cave to find:

Our heroes attack Khnathaiti’s thralls. Morgan makes his way to Tara, but she struggles against him and he can’t get her away.Morgan fights with the Scavenger, but the villain gets the better of him. Hearing her mate’s name and seeing him close to death somehow frees Tara from evil’s control. Before the Scavenger can strike the killing blow against Morgan, she attacks. The Scavenger throws her aside and she falls from height. Morgan strikes off the Scavenger’s head with his sword.

With the Scavenger dead, Khnathaiti looses the power she infused in him, she flees. Our heroes are victorious, but at what cost?

Despite appearances, Tara (still) isn’t dead—but Jennifer keeps the truth from her father. Khnathaiti still has Tara’s soul, so she is in a state between life and death. Jennifer could restore her, but only to a state of “unlife” and torment. Jennifer entombs her body with protective spells, hoping that she can find a way, someday, to restore her fully.

Things to Notice:

• The flashback to the events of First Issue Special #8 shows Morgan with the goattee he didn't have at the time he first met Tara.
• The cover of this issue is very 80s.

Where It Comes From:
Mariah's Russian captors make reference to events of her first appearance way back in Warlord #6. Government agents thinking she's a spy mirrors Travis Morgan's ecperiences with his own government on two different occasions.

Labyrinths of Shadow

The planet Tenebrae in the Zuran Expanse lives up to its name. In the gloom beneath perpetually darkened skies, the all but lifeless wastes hold the ruins of two civilizations  These ruins draw treasure seekers and archaeologists, but they don’t easily give up their secrets.

Tenebrae was a terraformed world and once home to thousands of colonists. A few large surface craters suggest this civilization was destroyed by meteor impacts and the nuclear winter that followed. This is believed to have been a purposeful assault rather than chance encounters. Most life above the unicellular level was destroyed.

Sometime later, the enigmatic zurr arrived. As on every other world with a zurr presence, only what appear to be ritual sites have been found: Three labyrinthine structures the size of small cities are evenly spaced along the equator. They’re made of a rock-like material with the appearance of basalt not found elsewhere on the planet.

Artifacts are found within the labyrinths, seemingly at random: small, nonrepresentational sculptures, pieces of the elaborate ceramic masks the zurr seem to wear (seen in the holographic images with the appearance of mid-reliefs embedded in the walls), and oddly, personal items the previous human civilization the zurr or someone else must have excavated from older ruins.

These trinkets can bring a few credits in the right markets, but the most valuable of the Tenebraean artifacts are the obsidian pentachorons. These items (or perhaps their 3 dimensional shadows) are found ensconced in rare alcoves in the walls of the labyrinths, where they have the appearance of glassy, black pyramids. When held by a sapient being the pyramid takes on the appearance of a 4-dimensional solid rotating through 3-dimensional space. The rate of rotation of a pentachoron changes in the presence of a hyperspatial node. Psi sensitive individuals holding a pentachoron hear a multitude of whispering voices. The objects are resistant to damage, but they can be destroyed—though only utterly. No one has ever succeeded in fragmenting or shattering one.

The pentachorons and the other treasures are zealously guarded by short humanoids called “skulkers.” Little is known about them, except that they appear to inhabit subterranean warrens beneath the labyrinths, they shun bright lights, and they are utterly hostile to other species.

Harryhausen

Gamers & Grognards suggested a blogfest in honor of Ray Harryhausen's passage. I didn't figure I could do much better than this post I wrote back in 2010:

"Swords & Stop-Motion"

Enjoy.

Aliens to Know and Fear

I keep thinking I'm going to stat these guys, but I haven't got around to it yet, so I figured it was time to share. I don't know the original artist or source, but this should prove a handy reference for "real world" close encounters. You can't tell the players without a scorecard.

1. Roswell, 1947. As described by Beverly Bean, who reportedly had the bodies described to her by her father who had guarded them: "He said they were smaller than a normal man--about four feet--and had much larger heads than us, with slanted eyes, and that the bodies looked yellowish, a bit Asian-looking."
2. Valensole, 1965. Maurice Masse a French "agriculturalist" saw a spaceship and these guys
3. Villa Santina, 1947. An Italian artist was able to sketch his close encounter.
4. Salzburg, 1957. A soldier in the U.S. Army supposedly described these guys to a Canadian newspaper.
5. California, 1952. Orthon of Venus gave a message to George Adamski about nuclear energy.
6. São Francisco de Sales, 1957. Antonio Vilas Boas was abducted by these smartly uniformed guys who took him to have sex with an alien babe.
7. Voronezh, 1989. Robotic alien shows up in Russia to hassle teenagers as witnesses look on.
8. Aveley, 1974. Weird aliens abduct a whole family.
9. Pascagoula, 1973. Carrot alien. Only in Mississippi.
10. Caracas, 1954. He had a sphere motif going on.
11. Greensburg, 1973. Bigfoot-UFO team-up.
12. Kelly, 1955. Better known as the Hopkinsville Goblin Case--which I have statted.
13. And the Chupacabra needs no introduction.

Warlord Wednesday: Queen's Requiem

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Queen's Requiem"

Warlord #125 (January 1988)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Pencils by Jan Duursema, Inks by Tom Mandrake

Synopsis: The Shamballan survivors of the volcanic eruption numbly work to bury their dead. A cloaked figure arrives to add to their misery: the newly made Scavenger of Souls. Morgan rides up and catches him crouching over one of the dying. Morgan recognizes him and they scuffle. His barest touch on Morgan’s bare arm paralyzes it, allowing him to escape. Morgan realizes if he hadn’t pulled himself free, the touch would have killed him.

In the palace, Jennifer shares what’s she’s learned about recent events with Tara. The volcano eruption and the eclipse aren’t separate events, but harbingers of a doom that threatens the world. Jennifer has discovered an evil lurking in a cave beneath the volcano. Tara says she’ll go check it out. Jennifer suggests maybe she should wait for Morgan, but Tara sets her straight:

Jennifer gives her the magic talisman given to Morgan by V'Zarr Hagar-Zinn (is issue #114).

In that cave, the Scavenger has returned to his mistress and is regurgitating the souls he collected for her nourishment. Khnathaiti tells him her origin story: how she ruled over Mu, sucking souls, until all their greatest wizards teamed up and imprisoned her in the sarcophagus. The Scavenger isn’t paying a lot of attention as he’s watching Tara approach in the scrying pool, and drooling over her. Khnathaiti tells him he can have Tara’s body—as long as she gets Tara’s soul.

Elsewhere in Skartaris, Mariah, wandering in the wilderness, enters a cave to rest and winds up walking through to Siberia. She sees Soviet soldiers setting up a satellite dish. When a pteranodon flies past her through the cave and attacks. Mariah jumps out to help them. She repaid for her heroism by getting taken captive to be taken to the KGB.

Morgan, still feeling drained by the Scavenger’s attack collapses into bed. Shakira in cat form comes out of hiding to curl up beside him. While he sleeps, Tara enters the cave.

She encounters the last remaining lackey of Khnathaiti. A ring she’s wearing seems to drive him away, but then, the Scavenger appears. She strikes at him with her blade, but he is unaffected by mortal weapons:

Meanwhile, the dead rise in the Shamballan streets. They began shambling toward the volcano—and the cave.

Morgan wakes up. He feels a presence in the bedchamber--and he’s barely able to dodge the cloaked figure’s sword slash! Morgan pulls his own sword, but his only holding his own against his attacker. In a last ditch effort to avoid a descending blade, he flips the figure off a balcony—and see’s it’s Tara!

Things to Notice:

• Duursema has eveybody suddenly with exuberant Bon Jovi-esque hair.
• You would think Jennifer (as supreme Skartarian sorceress) might get more involved in fighting a magical menace.

Where It Comes From:
As she tells the Soviet soldiers in this issue, Mariah Romanova is indeed a citizen of the U.S.S.R. (and former national fencing champion!). It isn't something that has come up a lot since the seventies Grell issues. Morgan too emerged from Skartaris into Soviet territory (back in issue #52), though he didn't use a cave.

At this point in the history of the title, DC Comics editorial policy is that Skartaris is in a separate dimension accessible via the Poles, rather than an inner earth.

Mountain Lair Map

Remember back in the early days of the "War on Terror" when bin Laden was suppose to have a cool super-villain (or orc chieftain, what have you) lair beneath a mountain in a cave complex called Tora Bora ("Black Cave" in Pashto, which only adds to the mystique)? Turns out that wasn't true, but in the those days of fevered speculation, the Times of London produced this cool cross-section:

Obviously, you could put some sort of terrorist mastermind there, but it could also double as the sanctum of Cthulhu cultists or goblins, or whatever. Reality's loss is your game's gain!

Traveling the Strange Stars

Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Archaic Oikumene is the hyperspace travel network. Though the means of the network's engineering—even much of the basic science science behind it—has been lost, current civilization is still able to make use of it to travel the stars faster than light. The rediscovery of a lost node is a major find, potentially introducing uncharted systems to interstellar civilization.

In the present era, the topology of the network appears to be much simpler than in ancient times. In most cases, nodes only connect to one or two neighboring nodes. The technology behind the nodes is at least partially psionic in nature. Specially trained psi-sensitives (or specially gengineered sniffer animals) can detect inactive nodes. Re-activating one requires brute-force hacking and psionically transmitted passcodes. Experts in hyperspace net architecture believe there is a quantum encrypted strata that at one time connected individual worlds—maybe even individual citizens. This higher end network is inaccessible in the current era.

Active nodes have exit and entrance gates fitted to them and terminal stations, located a safe distance away. Most of these structures date back centuries; a few even to the Oikumene. In civilized areas (particularly those once under the control of the Radiant Polity) tolls are often charged for network access and every ship passing through must have an identification transponder. So-called “black gates” exist, hidden in out-of-the- way systems that provide access without going through the public nodes. Military controlled gates sometimes exist, built near and accessing public nodes, but are given priority.

The conduits through the hyperspace are like latticework tubes of exotic matter. The distance between two points in normal space has very little to do with transit time through hyperspace. Instead, congestion and poorly understood conduit properties ("bandwidth") play a greater role. Terminal traffic control authorities try to manage congestion, but nodes deliver faster travel times to other destinations regardless—and this can vary over time.

While starmaps tend to represent the network as composed of simple lines between nodes, the internal workings of the network are considerably more complex. Most cultures rely on advanced computers to perform the rapid and complicated computations necessary for navigating hyperspace, though, some cultures have engineered biologic minds with intuitive abilities in these areas.

The poorly understood relationship between psi and hyperspace has led to more than a few fringe and paranoid memes, as well as legitimate scientific inquiry. So far, no theory is satisfactory. Psi-sensitive individuals tend to find hyperspace travel a bit uncomfortable. Many report the strange sensation of being watched.

Iron Men

I saw Iron Man 3 last night. It was enjoyable; along the level of Iron Man 2, I would say--so judge that how you will. It certainly took an interesting approach in that there was a lot of "iron" and a lot of "man," but seldom did the two come together in the usual way.

The Anthology Crawl

News of Andrew J. Offutt's passing on April 30 got me to thinking about the Sword & Sorcery anthology he edited (Swords Against Darkness) and fantasy anthologies in general. It seems to me you could use such an anthology (or anthology series) for inspiration and nonrandom "random placement" of encounters/things of interests in a hexcrawl or dungeoncrawl.

Simply pick an anthology. Read every story in it (even the duds--but skimming is ok) and pick some interesting element out of each, be it a monster, encounter, location, or item. Place these on your map in order, or arrange them to taste. You could even get more "madlibs" about it and predetermine what you were going to take from each story (an item, a place, an encounter), before you read (or re-read) the story, forcing you to stretch your creative a bit more to fit it in.

Warlord Wednesday: Scavenger of Souls

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Scavenger of Souls"

Warlord #124 (December 1987)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Pencils by Jan Duursema, Inks by Tom Mandrake

Synopsis: Morgan goes running across the devastated and burning city of Shamballah to the palace and his mate, Tara. He finds her in the ruins, trying to rescue a girl stuck under a timber. Together Morgan and Tara free her but then find themselves surrounded by flames. Kara aka Power Girl swoops in to rescue them.

Meanwhile, Jennifer thinks something more than a natural disaster is going on. In her sanctum, she summons “benevolent elementals” to query them:

While our heroes fight the fires and advancing lava in Shamballah, the three inhuman sorcerers swarm around a golden, skull-adorned casket—the thing that was inside the crystal egg. Their Mistress has survived the crossing. “Let evil rejoice.”

To revitalize herself, she sucks up the energy of one of her lackeys. Then she tells them to go out and find more fools to serve her.

After hours of dealing with the disaster, Morgan and Tara return to their bed chamber. They’re still filled with a sense of foreboding—and they should be, because at that moment, two-bit Aquaman foe, the Scavenger is shooting his way past their guards and into the palace. He uses his scorpion ship to bust into the palace vault.

Morgan’s awakened from sleep. His keen plot senses detect that something’s afoot. He and Tara surprise the Scavenger mid-theft. Scavenger knocks out Tara and grazes Morgan’s shoulder with a shot. He thinks he’s free and clear to escape in his craft. He’s mistaken:

The ship crashes. Morgan beats the hell out of the Scavenger and would kill him, but Tara intervenes. Scavenger may have lost the battle, but he’s just the kind of scum the sorcereress Khnathaiti needs. She transports him to her lair and offers him a job.

The Scavenger isn’t impressed by her magic tricks or her offer. He’s a bit more impressed when she syphons the energy from another of her servants, and transforms herself from an old crone to a beautiful younger woman. Has she moves closer to him, the Scavenger asks if she’s going to “waste him.” The sorcereress replies: “No part of you is going to be wasted, Scavenger. It shall all be…used.”

While the sorceress does her evil work, Jennifer and Kara are making their good-byes. The elementals told Jennifer that Kara was needed back on earth. Reluctantly, Kara leaves to return to the DCU proper.

Meanwhile, Khnathaiti’s work is done:

Things to Notice:

• Morgan thinks (for some reason) that Skartaris doesn't need superheroes.
•  Khnathaiti is even worse on henchmen than the usual evil mastermind.

Where It Comes From:
The Scavenger (Peter Mortimer) first appeared in Aquaman #37 (February 1968). He was always looking for an ancient alien device called the "Time Deccelerator." Apparently, he eventually found it and that's what ultimately landed him in Skartaris, where he shows up in issue #118. He went from a couple of other changes and retcons beyond the one here before getting killed in Hawkman #15 (1994).

Kara does indeed return to Earth, and next appears a few months later in Infinity, Inc. #50.

Queen of Diamonds

Like a jewel on the Rim of known space, the Fortuna system and its casino stations beckon. It’s one of the most glamorous destinations in the Strange Stars: Where else can fortunes be won (or lost) on a roll of the dice in view of a planet made of diamond?

The casinos, bordellos, and other pleasure stations are mostly found at lagrange points in the orbit of the gas giant, Fortuna IV. While the gambling houses are independently owned, they all rely on the keen Minds of the Gaming Comission. This ai collaborative ensures no one cheats and monitors all gambling aspects of casino operation as a service to the owners. No one knows the location of the Comissions’ primary minds, but it’s rumored to be deep within the atmosphere of Fortuna IV.

The most famous of the Fortunan casinos is the Wheel--a station designed to look like an Old Earth roulette wheel. It's rumored to be owned by Alys Eldorose, a famous gambler in her own right. Some say Alys was one of the original colonizers, whose mind sailed out on a lightship at 10% of the speed of light back in the Age of Human Expansion. If so, she would be thousands of years old. Alys is never known to have responded to these rumors, one way or the other.

Alys also owns the diamond planet, Solitaire (Fortuna I). She leases parts of it to mining concerns, but mostly uses it for entertainment and gambling. Bot races take place on the planet’s darkside with feeds for teleoperation and telepresence for the casinos' patrons. It’s rumored Alys may also have a data vault buried deep underground along the terminator, where the heat starts to climb to metal-liquefying temperatures.

Getting There is Half the Fun: FTL in Sci-Fi Settings

Faster-than-light travel is a staple of most science fiction: It’s hard to get strange new worlds and strange new lifeforms without it. There are a lot of different methods that turn up in fiction to get around, and the method that is the one “that works” in a given setting has implications on how adventures play out and even what sort of adventures are possible.

In Star Trek (and a number of other sci-fi universes), for instance, warp drive is the way it’s done. While the theory doesn’t always reflect the way it appears in story, warp drive is essential a means for going superluminal but just kind of ignoring Einstein. Ships still seem to interact with things around them as if they were traveling at “normal” sort of velocities.  This makes high-speed space battles do-able, and FTL travel itself doesn’t play a part in where bases or settlements will be put. Space travel is easily (maybe a little too easily) analogized to earthly exploration and warfare.

On common method is via hyperdrives or jump drives. Essentially these provide FTL via transfer to another dimension (“hyperspace”) where the usual physical laws don’t apply. This sort of travel comes with a lot of variants, but there are two factors that make the most difference: instantaneous vs. noninstantaneous and gates vs. no gates.

In the instantaneous variety, not much time (if any) is spent in hyperspace; it’s essentially teleportation. This means no FTL battles and perhaps no FTL chases. The tense moments are the ones leading up to the “jump,” because once that’s accomplished pursuers are lost and getaways made. (There is a variant where jumps might be short, defined distances, in which case you could have a sort of stuttering chase.) Like with warp drive, most of your adventuring time is spent in normal space, so the implications for setting design are pretty similar.

Noninstantaneous travel means ships spend some time in hyperspace. This allows chases (and possibly battles) in hyperspace, but also means that stuff can go on onboard a ship while the travelers maybe out of touch with the rest of the world. Also, hyperspace can have exotic hazards and even life. It becomes another interesting place to visit, not just a means for travel.

Nongated jumps mean a ship can do it on it’s on, whereas gated ones required specific structures or locations. Here, gates become places to meet and places to fight. Interstellar travel has choke points and routes like interstate highways. This can move space travel away from being like “ships at sea” to “like longhaul trucking.” Maybe (like in Cowboy Bebop) gates have tolls, so you could be stuck in one place until you’ve got the cash to proceed.

Anyway, there are other variables to consider (like whether people are awake in FTL or have to go into some sort of suspended animation). My purpose it not to give an exhaustive coverage of them all, but to suggest that these things aren’t just color or window dressing, but have implications for how the setting plays out and its feel.

It's Fun-Sized

Thanks to the largesse of Tim Shorts, I received the toy mini-comic sized adventure that is the Mini-Manor: Faces Without Screams in the mail last week. Small in size, perhaps, but not small in adventure. It's got face-stealing guys, naked goblins, and a merman berserker. If that list doesn't get you intrigued, you're probably just too jaded to be playing old school games altogether.

Check it out along with other fine GM Games products.

Other People's Weird Adventures

One of the cool things about getting Weird Adventures out there has been the opportunity to hear what other people are doing with it. Even more cool is getting the chance to be a player in someone else's game unfolding there version of the world. Lester B. Portly has been doing some playtesting of his pulp game Detectives & Daredevils on Google+, and I’ve been playing sometime trumpet player, sometime unlicensed private detective, Chick Marlowe. Lester has been taking us through a great interconnect set of crime stories involving Yianese drug-dealing tongs, alchemical drug formulas, and (possibly) jazz musician cultists.

Of course, watching somebody else play in your sandbox takes a little discipline. Even if you’re okay with them making changes (which I am), you've also got to resist the urge to jump in and “help out” when there’s a question about a setting detail that comes up. It’s been interesting to see how Lester has been making it his own. For instance, he tones down the fantasy/magic aspects of the setting a bit, though I think not as much as he initially thought he would. Still, his is a bit more “pulp world with more magic” compared to my “fantasy world in a pulp era.”

Anyway. I asked him a few questions about how he approached it. I don’t know if this will interest anyone but me, but here’s what he had to say:

What do you feel has been the hardest part of adapting the world for your own use? What amount of “weird” did I wanted my game to be. I wanted to be fairly accurate in capturing the flavour of the Weird Adventures book and I played around with the idea of cherry picking ideas, but settled on running the setting as written.

Because it is a distinct setting, I had to plug some minor details that were vague and hoped I wasn't screwing up stuff in the book that I missed. There were some things from fiction and history that I wanted to use that just wouldn't fit in.

What's been the most enjoyable part of doing so? I think that sticking with the setting as written has forced me to think outside the box. I enjoyed grafting on my own take to Weird Adventures.

Has your perception of the setting changed any in going from reading about and then playing in the setting vs. running it? The fantastic elements don't seem as problematic as I thought they would be. I wanted the weird elements to stick out. The bits that I have used worked fine without the game feeling like it was just standard fantasy in a hard-boiled drag.

Warlord Wednesday: Incantation to Eternal Night

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Incantation to Eternal Night"

Warlord #123 (November 1987)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Pencils by Jan Duursema, Inks by Tom Mandrake

Synopsis: In some extradimensional prison-realm, three formerly human, demonic entities sense their time to plunge Skartaris into eternal darkness is near. In their ghostly forms, they swirl around a crystal that holds their master, who only awaits their incantations to be reborn.

In Shamballah, Tara and Morgan are listening to the story of Kara and Jennifer’s story of their encounter with Azmyrkon. Suddenly, the eternal sun of Skartaris is eclipsed by the moon—a very rare event, and one that fills Tara with dread.

In the sewers beneath of the Shamballan slums, Redmond is waking up with a “I turn into a Sasquatch monster and kill stuff” hangover. His stolen pills are keeping him human shorter and shorter periods--and he’s more bestial now when he becomes the monster. He doesn’t even know what sort of animal he last ate.  Wait, what’s that in the pile of bones?

Redmond turns back into the monster, bursts up through the street, and goes on a rampage. News of the panic in the street reaches the palace. Morgan puts on his best gold mail muscle shirt and heads out to see what’s going on.

When Morgan gets to the poor part of town, he's accosted by a group of thugs. He makes short work of them, but while he’s in the midst of melee, Redmond sees him.

Redmond rants about taking him back to face a military tribunal for being a commie spy. Morgan realizes that the CIA agents travails in Skartaris have driven him from fanatic into complete insanity. Morgan begins to offer him help, but then Redmond transforms into the monster.

While Redmond and Morgan fight across the city, Tara and her soldiers defend the palace and the newly arrived refugees against the fear-maddened Shamballan mobs. In the nether-realm, the crystalline egg begins to hatch as the inhuman sorcerers continue their mystic chanting.

A volcano erupts near Shamballah. The shaking of the earth causes Morgan and Redmond to fall from a bridge. Lava flows beneath them. Morgan holds on with one hand, attempting to save both of them. The creature that was Redmond, however, can’t let go his savage hate. Morgan has no choice:

His enemy dead, Morgan crawls back up to the end of the bridge and looks out over a city in flames!

Things to Notice:

• And so, Redmond meets an ignoble end.
• Since when is there a volcano near Shamballah? 

Notes:
This issue brings Redmond's quest to an unceremonious and sort of anticlimatic end. The new villians are intriguing and more sword & sorcery than what we've seen in a while.

The Library

The Library of Atoz-Theln is the largest repository of knowledge in the known galaxy. It contains the noospheric archives of many worlds from the time of the Archaic Oikumene (and sometimes even more remote eras), and significant physical media from cultures both human and nonhuman. Built before the Great Collapse in the interior of a dwarf planet, it now lies within the lawless sector known as the Zuran Expanse. Despite its location, it remains an important center for scholarship.

The library is housed on several underground levels, all climate controlled for the particular media they hold. There are rest areas and tranquil spots to peruse information interspersed throughout, and rooms they were once spartan but serviceable quarters for travelers. Animated wall screens depict famous figures from the mythology and history related to the acquisition and preservation of knowledge from many worlds.

The library’s inhabitants and staff are tall, thin, humanoids with narrow skulls called Atozans. While their ancestors have been in the library since before the Great Collapse, their society experienced a dark age and backslid to savagery. Battles were fought between tribes occupying the popular culture mediascape and exobiology specimen sections. Dynastic histories from that time (meticulously carved into crystalline display screens) suggest there was once a bloody chieftain who rose from the recesses of the human evolution virtual displays.

Eventually, the Atozans clawed their way back to civilization and restored the library as best they could to its previous functioning. There are few of them left--only around 200--but their lives are extended by nanotechnology, and they long ago fabered small-scale cloning facilities. The ancient Library Mind never fully recovered its faculties, but the Atozans have managed to kludge a solution to the elaborate classification system used to organize the library's holdings. This encrypted, ceremonial language is known only to the Atozans and not shared with outsiders.

In the Cards

The Magi are a group of itinerant fortune tellers found throughout the Strange Stars but particularly in the Zuran Expanse. Viewed variously as mystics, cultists, or charlatans, and often treated with suspicion whatever the judgement, the Magi care about the opinions of other sophonts only to the degree it impacts their quest for enlightenment.

While baseline humanoid in appearance, Magi have a modified neural structure: The linkages within the reflexive system are enhanced, as is prefrontal-parietal interconnectivity. The result is enhanced intuitive and lateral thought processes and the ability to utilize controlled dreamlike states of consciousness. Another consequence of this restructuring (not fully appreciated when it was implemented millennia ago) is greatly enhanced precognition.

The Magi use these abilities (or tell customers they use them) for fortune-telling. Like all fortune-tellers before them, they’ve found that discerning what the client wants to hear and telling them that rather than giving vague impressions of the actual future is generally more likely to generate referrals and return business. Magi favor an elaborate cartomancy using a deck they call the Zener Tarot (suits of Circles, Crosses, Waves, Squares, and Stars), a series of questions (many wholly unrelated to the question at hand), and some physiologic biometric assessment of the client. Which parts of this protocol and necessary and which are just for show is a closely guarded secret.

Magi are also sometime gamblers. They enjoy almost any game of chance. They are often accused of cheating and find it prudent to leave the area quickly after any significant win.

What really concerns the Magi and drives their wandering isn’t the future, but the nature of reality. As an order (perhaps as a glitch in their neural arrangement) they are haunted by contemplation of the simulation hypothesis: they fear the world as they perceive it is only a computer simulation. Their hypercognitions and precognitions only fuel this ontological fear. The Magi search for either conclusive proof these fears--the final “tell” that will give away the game--or evidence of the transcendent uncomputability of universe, a concept they hold in awe and fear like unto a god.

Welcome to the Machine

“Moravec” is the term generally used among the Strange Stars to refer to self-replicating robot sophonts. They are differentiated from “bots” (manufactured robots, typically low or nonsapient) and von Neumanns (self-replicating robots, low or nonsapient). The appellation comes from the surname of a historical Old Earth scientist-prophet. It apparently came into use through the more flowery “Children of Moravec”--a line from a protest song sang during smartmob events by moravec revolutionaries who regarded the extant term “robot” as a slur. At least, that’s the history as remembered by some moravecs; it all occurred millennia ago, and more than one dark age (major and minor) lies between then and now.

A moravec mercenary from a promotional vid

Today, moravecs are as varied as humanity’s biologic descendants. Many are humanoid in form (or android or gynoid) and inhabit worlds less tolerant of biological life. Others have forms reminiscent of arthopods and crawl over asteroids or comets, sometimes with their intelligences distributed over an entire swarm. Still others have spaceship-sized bodies: The warrior-poets of Eridanus are one militant order in this last group.

A warrior-poet prepares for combat--and composition

Servants of the Zhmun

The zhmun inhabit a domed city on the small, austere world of Aygo, orbiting a yellow star in the Zuran Expanse. Their famed wealth comes from ancient treasure stores (the contents as much of value as art objects or archaeological finds as anything else) and by their control over the mining rights to three superterrestrial worlds in their home system. Enforcement of these rights and protection from interstellar marauders of the Expanse comes via their alliance with sophont, ship-sized moravecs that have patrolled the system since ancient times.

Zhmun are thought to be bioroids due to their unusual structure. They're invertebrates with ameboid characteristics, despite being multicellular. A zhmu uses the hydrostatic pressure of internal fluids and the ability to quickly alter the rigidity of its tissues to hold itself in a roughly humanoid shape. Zhmun who can’t achieve consistent humanoid appearance are second class citizens—“globs.”  Zhmun are asexual (though sometimes assume gendered titles) and reproduce by pinching off a bit of their substance and tossing it into comunnal vats of doughy proto-zhmu plasm. Zhmun are only allowed to contribute to vats in their living districts, which are rigidly segregated by status. While zhmun don’t need to sleep in the human sense, they do need to relax their hold over their form for a few hours every few standard days. They're also said to re-encode information from ancient brain scans from their sacred stores every week or so, but it is uncertain if this serves a ritual or biologic purpose.

Zhmun perform no manual labor, but insist that their needs be provided for by biologic entities, not robots. Higher status zhmun perform no work at all. They affect an air of nobility and assume lofty, nonsensical titles. They spend their days in artistic pursuits or idle pleasures, as befits their station.  Globs direct zhmu business interests and supervise their myriad of alien employees and servants in the name of a zhmu master. Menial tasks are performed by a slave clade of unknown origin, collectively called yoom. Yoom are low on the sophont-scale and are bred in a variety of function-based forms from brutish, thick-browed laborers and bodyguards to sleek, quadrupedal racers.

The zhmun’s paid employees arrive from the co-orbital planet, Erg. There, a rundown spaceport, mining camps, and shantytowns attract the desperate and down an out of known space. They watch the job listings, hoping to get a lucrative position with the zhmun, either serving them on Aygo, or working in their mining concerns on the neighboring planets. or (dare they hope?) representing zhmu interests on other worlds. While they wait, they pay rent to the zhmun on whatever shabby accommodations they can find, and go in debt buying food and entertainment in zhmu-owned businesses.